The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #150071   Message #3514554
Posted By: Steve Shaw
13-May-13 - 09:20 AM
Thread Name: BS: Militant atheism has become a religion
Subject: RE: BS: Militant atheism has become a religion
I guess I still can't understand why you are so insistent on your need to refute what others believe. Is there some reason why it is so hard for you to say, "It doesn't work for me," and then just let it be?

What you believe is entirely your affair. As long as you can accept that the world is full of many alternative beliefs and none, that yours has no automatic precedence over any others, and that you have no moral right to propagate your particular belief-by-accident as truth to other people (especially children, who end up as Christians only because they happened to be accidentally born to a Christian family in a Christian country). "Let it be" doesn't do it for me in those circumstances. I don't deny that there are some religious families who educate their children in matters religious very well, but many do not and there is nowhere near enough of a decent template that ensures that children are left unfettered by a particular belief system. Saying that you do the right thing, which I don't deny, does not let the whole of Christianity, or Islam, or any other proselytising faith, off the hook.

It has made my life very rich, learning that there are many answers to the questions of life.

I can only commend to you again the answers (and the quest for them) based on rational thought. That is not anything like as abjectly boring and Spock-like as it sounds. The world, nature and the universe are wonderful in their beauty, complexity and their amazing ordinariness. There's more than enough there to enrich your life for ever without the need for resort to irrational speculations.