Try to work on your ideas of a religionless world and see if you need to take away God from man’s heart and mind.

What you will find out if you are honest is that you will take out God the intelligent God and substitute the unintelligent evolution or disorder for God.

So that instead of an intelligent God in charge of everything you have a dumb God of evolution or disorder to be in charge [sic] of everything and mankind the intelligent entity coming from disorder.

Think about that: which is an intelligent worldview that an intelligent God started everything including intelligent mankind, or a dumb evolution which is disorder started everything by way of disorder and eventually man came forth the intelligent organism.

Gerry

I applaud every point that you have suggested here and am living proof that it is the only way. Though my wife has not let go of her beliefs, there has been a real learning process here of how tolerance breeds freedom. At the time of my de-conversion I experienced a myriad of emotions to include anger, which I vented by attacking the church (verbally), over time however, I realized the uselessness of such devotions. If anything, it proved to solidify my wife’s conclusions further producing anger within me and forming a vicious circle. As of lately, I have become much more tolerant of her position only to make it clear that the same respect be made of mine. I even support and encourage her to study ever the more deeply. The result has been slow but positive. She has loosened her totalitarian grip ever so slightly and two of our kids have proclaimed a disbelief in the Christian method. A third child is teetering and the other is just way to young to understand any of it. But I am careful to allow them the opportunity to explore and discover for themselves. I encourage critical thinking and present the world as a magnificent discovery zone that seems to get easily overlooked by the common man. It was my own sense of freedom to explore that I came to the point where I am now.

In those early days of leaving Christianity I searched for support, which was difficult to find at the time. But I did find it and one thing I noticed was that I would shy away from any verbiage that sounded militant, dogmatic, judgmental or hateful. Those qualities did nothing encourage me to move further from the system I was leaving. I longed for the sincere individual that was painfully committed to the truth. Sadly, many of the support sites were littered with “evangelical” atheists.

I know this is a long response and I apologize, however I believe you have made a very valuable point and wanted to express my thanks to you. May the world grow strong through loving understanding.

Good point about the the no God thing. I should’ve thought that through better before I said it.

This is what I will not show tolerance towards– the introduction of intelligent design as a science in schools when it clearly is not science, most schools will therefore, not teach the science of evolution. That is child abuse! If I were to threaten my child with being beaten to an inch of their life if they were not good, that would be child abuse even if I never did it. Why? Because it’s what is called emotional abuse and trust me, that abuse stays with people for a long time. So why is this different than telling children about hell and how their non-Christian friends will go there simply because they are of a different religion? Why is it as a tax payer do I have to accept the tax free exempt status that religion enjoys? I am paying more to help support something that I don’t believe in. I could go on but you get my point, there are many more examples.

I will be intolerant to people who think they have the right to force their religion on me and on my country. I happen to not live in a country where there is a difference between the state and the church, if you do then you are very lucky. It means that you don’t have to put up with superstition entering into decisions made by your government under the protection of ‘religion’. If the person that runs your local hospital believed in Voodoo magic as the answer to treating cancer and you did not share their values, would that not make you intolerant & a little angry? You be religious in your life but don’t expect me to put up with your values as I don’t share them and I don’t want them! One final point: there has been centuries of reasoning to why there is no [religious] God, I can’t sum it all up so I would encourage you to go and find that stuff out. Not to change your religious belief rather to understand how others think differently from you.

Thank you for your comments.

Also, you teach tolerance here. Why are you then intolerant toward Christians and Muslims? You trash their beliefs and for some reason take this as proof there is no God.

Of course, I would argue religion makes life better, and that it is not a need but a choice for religion, but that’s neither here nor there right now.

The Apostates of Islam did not change their belief via nonbelievers attacking their religious convictions, if you read their website it is clear why this happened. The idea of truth, harm and wrongness are the reasons for the apostates of Islam, in essence Islam caused these people to become nonbelievers! Although I don’t have time to take a poll for all of those that became ex-believers, the members of apostates of Islam I think make it clear they had a morality that far surpassed that of Islam, it is their morality which made them reject it. I don’t have to reconcile anything here; I just need to invest time in the three steps that I mentioned being that of tolerance, social justice and empowerment. It is these three ideas which I consider important that will create the ex-believers and at no point does this include attacking the convictions of religious people. I never said religious people don’t change, I said my arguments as a nonbeliever will never cause them to change directly. Other things will however. Me saying there is no God does not help, me demanding equal rights for women will. I will always point out the wrong things and make an argument against them, I just won’t invest my time into attacking religious convictions.

Thank you for your comment; I hope I made that clearer for you!

Then you say “I read on the apostates of Islam, which is a group of ex-Muslim believers…”

Funny. Some Muslims changed their mind… and then started a support group for ex-Muslims. But, faced with this evidence of shock, horror, ‘free thinking’ amongst Muslims who changed their mind, you still believe that it is “pointless to argue with religious people” because you will never convince them to change.

How do you reconcile knowing about ex-Muslims, indeed, there are ex-Christians, and ex-Sikhs, etc, etc, and yet still holding the view that religious people ‘don’t change’?

This does not compute.

Thank you for your comment!

Personally I hope for the second one- where everyone is atheist and don’t understand how religious people think so they turn holy sites into tourist traps… well, more so than they are know.