Ltrain wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:You don't get to have private religious views.
I sure as hell do have that right. If I want to believe in a damn spaghetti monster that's my own business. And I will keep my personal relationship with a higher power or a lack of one and my belief or non belief to myself.
You're entitled to your own views on religion literally in the most minimal sense that no one can put you jail for having those views. Beyond that is where your private opinions stop becoming entitled. You have absolutely no right to have your private views on the subject
respected, because they're a statement about the world we all live in. I wouldn't respect you having completely nonsense views on the subject of chemistry. If you're going to live in the world that the rest of us live in, and you're going to think something about how that world works, then you're either right or you're not. If you're not right, why should anyone respect your continued holding of that position?
You have somehow taken "conceited" to mean "more confident in their views" and have said something to that effect and tried to lure me away from my one and only point. I followed you down that rabbit hole for a while, and I really should've known better.
conceited: excessively proud of oneself; vain
Look, if someone is an atheist and keeps it to themselves, obviously I don't think they are conceited.
That's because you don't know they're an atheist. For all you know, the vast majority of atheists say nothing about their perspective, and you're only hearing from a few.
So I bet if you did find that out about someone, you would think they're conceited, because you're tarring all atheists with the same brush. What makes someone conceited, that they have a view or that they tell other people about their views? If it's the latter, do you think physicists are conceited because they publish journal articles about physics?
Consider this though. Who is more likely to get in someone else's business about religion? Someone who has a very strong belief or non belief, or someone who doesn't think you can't really know for sure?
First, this is false equivalence. When atheists "get in someone else's business" about religion, usually that implies writing a strongly worded blog post or YouTube video. Once in a while a book gets published. Did you know that you could have freely chosen not to post
at all in this thread, or even chosen not to respond to any of my posts? No harm would have come to your life. I wouldn't have tracked you down or PM'ed you, badgering you to explain yourself. Your participation in this thread is entirely voluntary. When religious people get involved in someone else's business, usually that implies saying they can't get married or have an abortion or have sex with each other.
Second, "you can't really know for sure" is a cop-out. The entire agnostic position is a cop-out. Why? Because in reality you either believe in god or you don't. If you are aware of religion and don't believe in it, you have made a conscious choice. You have implicitly said that the probability that the religious people are right about what they're saying is low enough that you can ignore it (either the probability that God exists, or the probability that there is any meaningful reward to belief, or both). That may not be the argument you actually make or the words you use, but your actions are what speak volumes in this case. So by their own actions, agnostics are effectively atheists. The only relevant difference is that agnostics are in denial about basic probability theory. (OK, OK, there's obviously some subtleties involved here, of the Pascal's Wager type, but I can basically guarantee that most agnostics haven't thought about it that hard.)
In my 35 years on this earth, I have never seen an agnostic get all up in someone's business about it.
Well, yes. If you think you know nothing about a subject, then it seems logical not to try to tell anyone your views, because you don't have any views. That doesn't make them extra respectable. I know very little about economics, so I don't go preaching to other people about whether they should prefer austerity policy or not. That doesn't make me a good person, it's baseline human decency. (Maybe good in a relative sense, because so few people have learned this basic skill.)
But if you do know something that someone else doesn't, and you have a good reason to understand it better than that other person, it doesn't make you conceited to try and explain it to them.
