Jayhawker Soule

Best of luck. I hope you find what you're looking for.

[ one 2-syllable word; one spelling error ]

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

Gurdur

I wasn't going to post anything tonight - got better things to do - but I saw this, and it just needs response.

Gosh, my fellow atheists dismay me sometimes.

First off:
I've known Agnostic Gal a fair bit through several quite intensive discussions of this board; she's an honest, searching, and intelligent person --- and a very nice person.
And yup, she was a genuine atheist.

The fact that she's reconverted to the Catholics doesn't particularly worry me, since I assume she will still maintain a level of questioning, searching and criticism that she's shown here.

Perhaps a few atheists might like to reconsider their political stance that every theist is perforce a brainwashed robot. Or would that be too skeptical, too much like hard work ?

Plus asking her why might be a far sight more productive than simply denouncing her.
Or is that somehow just too difficult ?

_____________

Hey, good to see you again, Agnostic Gal.
Don't be a stranger.

Regards,
The As-Ever-A-Hardline-But-Rational Atheist Gurdur

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

Sephiroth

Gurdur, why should I be so happy and cheery when someone says this? I don't care how she acts around you, such a quote proves either naivette or bigotry.

himynameisPwn

Just make sure your children don't participate in any extraciricular activites at Catholic sunday school.

Of all the reasons to convert, I have yet to find someone to show me a reproducable experiment to prove the existance of God. Not only that, no one can even define God. At least people who carry around lucky rabbits feet can define luck. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Gurdur

OK, let me be really, really blunt.
Sephiroth, you're one of the people on SecWeb who I've always had a very high regard for, so I'll be really open with you.
When I made my post above, I thought of somehow trying to explicitly say you were not one of those I was counter-attacking - since I respect your concerns.

However, let's take a look at the situation and the person and the other people:
Cheap Thrill lives up to his user name by attacking someone unprovokedly. Hardly uplifting, especially when he intimates she was lying when she said she was an atheist.

She then gets attacked all round for two different things -
1) the fact she reconverted
2) some statements on her website

(1) doesn't worry me, for reasons given above.

(2) might worry me, as it does you, Sephiroth, however, I would want to ask her a hell of a lot more questions first in order to understand her chain of thought before I started condemning her.
I have a good regard for her, and as far as I can see she's still a nice, intelligent person --- even if I myself might strongly disagree with some of the things she says.

You should; to understand a person, it's helpful to see them in a whole range of situations.
Posibly naiveté there, but again I would like to ask her more questions first before concluding that.
There are several bigoted remarks above from atheists.

Frankly, atheist bigotry worries me far more than theist bigotry, since I don't always expect much from theists, but I want atheism (and more importantly humanism) to be seen as a viable, attractive option, and atheists who simply jump up and down (no, this does not include you) denouncing and jeering at theists for simply being theists are about as impressive as one troop of monkeys throwing rotten fruit at another rival troop of monkeys.
I don't mean that behaviour on this thread has reached that level - but I've seen such behaviour often here.

I very much care about humanism, and then atheism; I would like to see many, many more humanist atheists (the nihilists can kiss my arse); and I want to see humanism and atheism presented and lived out the best possible way here on SecWeb and in Real Life.

Which includes finding out more before jumping all over Agnostic Gal.

ashibaka

When I questioned you a few months ago, ReligionOfTheMonthGal, you told me that you reconverted because the theists you knew were friendlier than the atheists you knew. That didn't seem to make much sense to me... it's the way of thought, not the people who think it, right?

Gurdur

Nothing like a good ad hom for a supposedly rational argument !
Makes sense (sadly) to me; many people unconciously assume that the ideology is proven by its adherents; i.e. if people are better on one side, then that side must be better.

'course, you can prove how deeply right we are by simply calling her more names....

Vorkosigan

Hi Theistgal,

I can only echo Gurdur. Just like to apologize. Some of our membership is behaving like Christian fundamentalists. Sorry about that.

Vorkosigan

sidewinder

What did you think of his prediction that organized religion would die out in about 200 years or so? I happen to agree with him. You can see the influence and attraction of organized religion slowly fading on our planet. It's a very slow process but it's happening.

Also, why did you pick the Catholic church? How did you choose that Christian church over all the others under the Christian banner? Why not the Mormon church, or the 7th Day Adventist church, or the Christadelphian church?

Toto

It's not difficult, but it seems unnecessary. She has a web page full of reasons, and I haven't gotten through reading them yet (although the link about why she stays a Catholic is broken - but I found it <a href="http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/a.html" target="_blank">here</a> - so she believes that the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ? There's not much you can say to someone who thinks that). Maybe she could point out the executive summary?

But it's obvious what happened. She suffered a traumatic event (the WTC attack). In such cases, people tend to revert to childhood behaviors for their emotional comfort.

So some (presumably Irish-Catholic) New York firefighters died doing their job (something they realized might happen when they took the job), and former-atheistgal rejoins an institution that is a major impediment to world population control, an institution that exercises a malevolent influence in American politics. An institution that showed signs of promise 30 years ago, but is now firmly in the control of reactionary throught-controlling anti-women bureaucrats who stand in the way of medical sanity.

So Theistgal - what came over you? How long before you come to your senses again? What do you think of that embarrassing fraud Padre Pio, and those crypto-Nazi popes that the current pope wants to canonize? I won't dwell on the pedophile priests because you have a web page on them in which you waffle between saying it happened in spite of their religion, and saying it maybe never even happened look at the McMartin hysteria. But why did the hierarchy of the church cover up the scandal for so long?

Or should I even ask?