++ [ originally posted by Tom ] ++...
I laughed because, yeah I find it amusing that people devote their entire lives to following something that is blatantly not real. Not one shroud of evidence has ever been produced to offer the slightest glimmer that christ/god exist yet people follow it to the grave, in my view wasting their life. If they want to do that, fine I respect that choice but there's nothing stopping me disagreeing with it, just as there's nothing stopping them saying I'll go to hell or whatever..
Tom -- and I entirely mean this respectfully -- it sounds as if you don't recognize that your own personal metaphysics is akin to a religious belief in itself. The opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy. And the opposite of a deep belief in some higher being isn't atheism, it's probably more like agnosticism. And your impassioned responses indicate anything but apathy about this subject. You're as much a religious zealot as they come.
In other words, to the casual observer you make it quite clear that you've got your own jihad going on, brother.
What it seems that you fail to comprehend here is that your choice of a religious belief system (or what you might dismiss as a lack thereof) or faith (or what you might dismiss as a lack thereof) has to be held to the same standard. Otherwise, you sound as you do now -- coming off with more than a complete air of smug superiority in how your belief system is naturally and unquestionably correct relative to everyone else's.
Which, in this respect, puts you in the same camp as every Crusader who raped and pillaged Asia Minor in the name of Christ ... and every radical Muslim who believes so deeply in the superiority of
their idea of Islamic law that they strap on homemade bombs to take out busloads of children in the name of Allah. Sure, nobody dies on this forum, but the very same sense of self-righteousness and superiority is there.
And then you make these statements with a real streak of malice behind them. It isn't enough to respectfully disagree, you need to remind people of how your belief system is naturally superior to theirs. It isn't enough to let people mourn the death of their spiritual leader in silence, you have to open your mouth and let your superior opinion be known about how much the guy was a fraud in the middle of his eulogy.
And then you wonder why people get bent out of shape at your responses. After all, they're the ones with the inferior belief system, right?