Discussion about whether atheists are arrogant because they don't believe or whether they don't believe because they're arrogant.
That discussion is over. You asked a loaded question intended to insult and demean atheist along with several contradictory and semantically incorrect comments, which have all been exposed or rejected. Move on.
I don't declare them sinners, but someone committing a homosexual act would be sinning.
Here's one of those semantic errors, which is you attempting to justify your Muslim homophobia. A sinner is defined as one who sins. That's true without knowing what sin means. A winner is one who wins just as a liar is one who lies. You want to condemn homosexuals and feign that it is not hatred and gross bigotry, but you haven't a chance. Others will make that judgment themselves. As soon as you enter that realm at all with your irrational and destructive religious beliefs, you have defined yourself to others based on their values and their judgments of yours.
That is permissable to say. It's actually required at times. We need to speak up against wrongdoing.
More of your semantic rationalization of your bigotry and hatred. You're just doing good, right? You're just trying to help these lost souls to be better and happier people under your rule. You love the sinner, right. Your love and compassion oozes from you.
This is just another example of hateful religious teaching calling itself love.
everyone's here making sure no one gets to discuss the actual topic
As I said, the topic is dead. It ended with the first post that pointed out that your OP was atheophobic nonsense.
You have become the topic, which is what happens in attack threads like these. People lose interest in your message as a possible primary source of information - as if you might have something to say worth considering on its merit - and begin evaluating your words as a window into who you are - your character and intelligence. There's really nothing else of interest in this thread apart from your performance in it.
You're assuming a motive.
You assume that your motives are hidden. That's a common mistake made by people trying to conceal their agenda. We know what your motive was for starting this thread. You've been called on it by several posters, and have offered no defense or evidence to the contrary, presumably because you have none. It's not your call what your motives are. You can state what you want others to read, but they will decide if you are being honest or sincere.
Are you familiar with the term ethos in the philosophy of argumentation? It refers to the qualities of a speaker or writer that influence how his message is received by his target audience. One sizes up a speaker in terms of how knowedgeable the seem about their topic, their apparent character, and suspected unseen motives or agenda, and the like. In short, is this a person to be trusted and respected, or something else.
You shot your ethos with your opening sentence. You made it clear that you don't understand atheists or why they are atheist, and that you dislike and disapprove of us. That's a pretty foolish way to approach whatever it is you are trying to accomplish unless your purpose is just to present another ignorant theist who has been taught to hate atheists.
Nothing that you say to try to convince others will be effective if you cannot convince them that either they misunderstood you, or that you have seen the error of your immoral ways, corrected them, and apologized. You've been asked explicitly to do this, and have refused.
Your ethos is sealed. You no longer have any hope of influencing your audience except to disrespect you and the ideology that generates people like you.
In my case, you didn't do yourself any favors with your posting etiquette. I quickly divide posters into two categories: those that properly respond to posts written to them by answering all non-rhetorical questions asked of them, and addressing all arguments made to them (usually in rebuttal to some point made) by either explicitly agreeing or by disagreeing and giving a reason argument to support that position beyond mere disagreement (I don't care if you disagree if you can't tell me why you think I'm wrong and you're right, since I don't care what you believe - just what you can demonstrate).
I wrote you a post early in thread in response to your comments which was carefully considered, sincerely believed, and constructively offered. You failed to reply. You immediately fell into the wrong category, and your sincerity, intelligence, and integrity all suffered. Your opinions no longer mattered except to be used to try to understand your motivations and character.
That's something all writers and speaker should try to avoid. Maybe next time with people unfamiliar with you.
How uneducated you are about Islam!
We learn about Islam by observing Muslims, not their literature. The same is true about Christians and Christianity. The truth is in the rendering, not the claims made. You both call yourselves religions of love, but it is easily seen in the rendering where the more of either of these religions one imbibes, the more hateful they become.
What I do is to try to collect as many data points (the posting of many theists and secular humanists) to try to determine the spectrum of people weighted by frequency (such as how do the creationists compare to those accepting evolution in terms of their relative frequency, the degree of their disbelief, their understanding of the science, and the quality of their arguments), and in this way, get a sense for what fraction of Christians are fundamentalists, and what are they like compared to other Christians, to Muslim fundamentalists, to polythesists and pagans, to satanists, and to secular humanists.
One poster said in your defense that you are only one Muslim who cited only a small piece of his Quran, but that's all any of these data points are - one example of the rendering of his or her religion or non-religion. That's another pixel in the big picture. You have not served your religion well, but that's fine with me. I just want to see what kinds of people it generates.
Islam is not defined by Muslims, it is defined by God
For you perhaps, but not for me as I just explained. I don't believe in your god. It is defined by observing an array of Muslims and discerning what fraction buy into the homophobia and atheophobia (you are counted among those that have accepted both), how intelligent and knowledgeable to they seem, how much or little their beliefs and values mirror mine and those of secular humanism, how inclusive or clannish they are, etc.
Looking at your so-called message from Allah adds is very little except as a measure of the degree you have bought into those teachings, which isn't really very important, Consider the Christians and Christianity. Once I have a sense for what fraction hate atheists, for example, it might be helpful to see all of the Christian Bible's atheophobic comments, but not very. As I said, what I care about is how the religion is rendered in daily life and the kinds of people it generates, not the claims it makes for itself
So no, Islam is defined for me by the behavior of people like you, not any god and not any so-called holy book. How arrogant of you to assume that others believe in your god or would agree with your myopic and tone-deaf comment. But you share that with virtually everybody else that has what they consider holy writing. They all cite is as if it should be authoritative to others not in their religion.
there are atheists in this forum who have said they are more intelligent than believers.
This is you projecting your insecurity about being disagreed with by atheists. You understand that the secular humanists (and even some of the Christians) are better thinkers than you are, and condemn them for thinking it without saying it.
But nobody was as arrogant as you and needed to tell you what we thought of you until you invited it. You invite it here now. So let me show you what you have unleashed. I don't think you're very smart, nor a good person, and I don't respect your religion. I wouldn't have told you that had you not gone on the attack, first calling us arrogant, then liars, and condemning our disinterest in discussing your claims any further.
But now, you have opened the door. To use the parlance of the legal profession, once you declared your hostility to atheists, you invited a different approach to you ("Your honor, permission to treat the witness as hostile"). So I feel free to tell you that you are correct. I do consider secular humanists overall to be more intelligent, better thinkers, and better people than theists.
This is not to say that I consider all secular humanists superior to all theists. The best Christians are just as intelligent, well educated, and decent as the best secular humanists. There are two in this forum that come to mind immediately. Their opinions and demeanor are indistinguishable from exemplary notwithstanding a professed Christian god belief.
Unfortunately, a smaller fraction of Christians fit this description than secular humanists, and they are the ones that have imbibed the least religion. My conclusion is that Christianity has a net negative effect on people compared to secular humanism, but not all of them, and the best of the Christians are the ones with the least Christian tribalism and fervor.
That tells me about the religion, and informs much of my antitheism. Too few people have the moral and intellectual integrity to reject most of the teaching of their religion, such as the harsh judgement of others, the homophobia and atheophobia, the incessant theocratic and anti-secular attempts to break the church-state wall, the anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism, and whatever other garbage is being taught to those not as well equipped to reject such teachings.
If Christianity had disappeared last century, all of what are presently Christians in their spectrum of decent to failed people would be more intelligent and decent over that spectrum, and the world a better place.
This is the tactic used by disbelievers to prevent unity among believers.
If we can disrupt your unity, then your worldview is fragile and weak. You have no power to disrupt our unity.
But we don't break you up. You do that yourselves. You just keep dividing and dividing into new religions and denominations without outside interference simply because none of you is anchored to fact, evidence, or reality. You're all free to make it up as you go along, believe whatever you want by faith, and do. You have little to hold you together. Then you war over minor differences and call one another sinner and heretic
Contrast this with science, which is the opposite. It is intimately tied to reality being grounded in empiricism and skepticism for received wisdom. That is why there are millions of gods and denominations, but only one periodic table of the elements, for example. How many do you suppose there would be if they were assembled by the religions and holy books?
My advice to you if you don't want to be treated like this is to change your name and avatar, and return with a little more humility and a little less hatred and arrogance even if you have to feign it. A couple other RF regulars have done that recently - attempted to reset and remake their RF personas by doing just that.
