This video is a couple years old, but it makes a worthy point for those of us who sometimes get weary of hearing how foolish and vile we are when we are accused of these things by people who don’t even know us.
Foolish and vile atheists
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:February 22, 2009
- Post category:Bigotry / Religion
- Post comments:183 Comments
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
TO EACH HIS OWN, IN THE END , ONE SIDE WILL WIN….
I LIKE MY CHANCHES AS OPPOSED TO, THOSE GENIUSES
WHO WILL BE SORRY WHEN IT IS TO LATE
If the winning side is Odin's or Brahma's, you might not be so pleased, you know.
Vile is a pretty strong term but the Bible says "foolish" because of everything that God 'sacrificed', for all of you by giving His very own Son to die for ALL of us. Going to get in big trouble but here goes anyhow, as far as I'm concerned atheism doesn't exist because we ALL have a 'conscience' and KNOW right from wrong, and KNOW way down deep inside we're longing for 'something' without even realizing that that something is actually God.
We've become selfish and satan has taken advantage of that selfishness, by blinding us even further to the 'truth' that we know exists, even if we won't acknowledge it. God's presence is all around us, each and every single day, in ways that we 'see' but blind ourselves to by placing other names to His presence.
To:Allison, as for Odin, Brahma, or any other such non-deity, they're long dead and have no claim on me, now or in the world to come.
Jer:You're 100% correct, "In the end one side will win, I like my chances as well, and yes those geniuses who who think they know best will be sorry, when they find out it's too late.
Lastly, for all those who love to let those around them know how proud they are to be atheists, agnostic, etc., can you say with 'everything' in you and mean what you say, until you breathe your last breath that if you are even a quarter wrong in 'your beliefs' that you are willing to live with horrific consequences of those choices???
Knowing that God had given you chance after chance, after chance, to get to know Him and come to live with Him "forever", but 'you decided within yourself that He wasn't worth it by closing your mind to the possibility of His existance and that of His son Jesus as well? If you can do this, then when then end comes, and you meet your fate then you ultimately have 'no one' to blame for yourself because of the 'choice' that "you" made and not the God who wanted "better" for you in the end. Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel 'were' right there with you and look what happened to them. God help you all.
I'm allowing the Bea K. comment through, even though it is clearly preaching to remind readers that we don't allow preaching. Comments telling us that we are evil and that Jesus died for our sins and that we will go to hell or that YOUR God is the real God and that all other Gods are false gods don't move the conversation forward. We would be interested in knowing WHY you believe these sorts of things, of course, especially if you believe them for reasons other than blind faith, because your parents taught you these things, because you're afraid of hell or because you read it in a "sacred" book.
This is also my chance to tell readers that I get these sorts of comments about once per month. Most of them get deleted as "preaching."
Nobody ever said many atheists weren't rational thinkers regarding the physical world. Its very obvious as it is one of the major reasons many people come to deny the existence of the supernatural or paranormal.
There are actually just as many theists throughout most of history that advanced mankind out of the dark ages of superstition.
As there are still many scientists who are still theists. The rub comes when atheists still think their rationality is superior to others.
Fools have said in their heart there is not God.
Fools have also said in their heart throughout history, because I can't see it or experience it I can't believe it. In this way they refuse to learn from history which is also not scientific.
This means potnetially that everything historical is also not rational as well to the mind of the atheist.
Bea? Shut up.
Sorry. Nothing pithy, just that. Do not preach here. Ever. Nothing offends me more. If you could "hear" with my perspective, you would be horrified at how hypocritically sanctimonious and frightened and bitter you sound. I am not afraid. And yep, I'm perfectly willing to risk YOUR God's eternal damnation in order not to deal with people like you in the meantime. Because you make no sense to me. You might as well be discussing your birth on an alien planet for all the credence I can give you.
And yes, I take your post personally because, well, it seems you were speaking directly to anyone who doesn't believe exactly as you do. I'm responding as such.
I am not an atheist. I am one of those confounding agnostics, proud some days, humble and confused others, but always certain that much exists we do not yet understand, only because science has so many advances to come. I do believe in a version of souls. I believe in connections that are not yet understood. We make the most of those connections in this lifetime we are given or we don't – but I do not believe in any 'power' that gives such a giant shit about us measly little humans that it would waste an entire eternity punishing us. Sorry, don't buy it. I was raised in Christianity, attended many a church well into adulthood, and never, ever bought into it.
So, as I said before – well, OK, before, I was rude so I'll rephrase – please go off and proselytize somewhere else.
Karl
Bullshit
A 'lack of athiests' in the past might have something to do with the use of the church as an arm of politics (or politics as an arm of the church). Hell – the Anglican church was created simply to allow the king to divorce – an act that was illegal under the rules of the Roman Catholic church.
Change the church, change the rules – but always to support the rulers, not the ruled.
Historically – it was extremely hazardous to ones health to suggest anything that smacked of heresy or apostasy (unless you happened to be the king – and in that case, the rules were in your favor).
Remember the Spanish Inquisition? How about Salem? In fact – pick a year, anytime between 100AD and the mid 1700's (pre enlightenment!), and I'll find you evidence of death, imprisonment and torture due to allegations of heresy, apostasy, or even 'wrong faith'.
Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, and many others – challenged for proposing theories that went against theocratic doctrine. Even with the political and financial power held by these individuals, they were still branded as heretics. How would it have been for anyone less well connected?
And before you cite Martin Luther, you may want to read the history again. That is schism, not apostasy or heresy (but again from a position of political power, not weakness).
I'd bet that many of your most forward thinking theists from the past were theists in name only – to be otherwise would have been suicide (and that's a sin, isn't it?)
Finally and tangentially, it always amazes me how readily current day fundamentalists rail at atheists and free thinkers, when their current freedom to BE fundamentalist was largely won by free thinkers who fought against establishment and privilege and hereditary powers.
Without the enlightenment, we all would still be peasants, with all the rights and privileges of peasants. Think on that.
Karl writes:—"This means potnetially that everything historical is also not rational as well to the mind of the atheist."
Well. I gotta say, in all honesty, that history is a catalogue of the irrational, and since 99% of the people in power have been religious or at least aligned with a church, I guess by extension that means religion is irrational.
Rationality, as far as I can tell, is not dependent on religious concepts. Most often, the rational has emerged in opposition to religious counterargument that wanted stasis. (The Church very well knew the Copernican model of the solar system was correct—they just didn't want to risk social disruption by making it public. The Church wanted control of the dissemination of knowledge because they didn't trust people to (a) use it correctly or (b) remain dedicated to the Church in the light of new knowledge.)
While the Church—i.e. Christianity (and by extension other religions)—never actively opposed movements to improve the human condition per se, they all opposed solutions which required the overturning of paradigms, either social or political. They exhibited a paradoxical mindset—progress is fine as long as nothing changes.
Tony writes:—"A ‘lack of athiests’ in the past might have something to do with the use of the church as an arm of politics (or politics as an arm of the church)."
Kind of like the mullahs claiming there are no homosexuals in Iran. We're all sure that's true (wink wink).
We know they're trying hard to ensure their statement is true.
Well, by all the reasoning and logic displayed here on DI, society should actually celebrate bisexuality and really only encourage that for people to be free of biases one way or the other, they need to be told to indulge their sexually anyway they see fit. This should really be the correct politically correct progressive mindset for humans, anything less would be hateful to those who would choose bisexuality.
That way we will all have intimate friends who are both male and female and no one can say we are oriented or imprinted in any way that might be biased towards anyone else.
People who decide to marry then should be "required" to have multiple members from both sexes in one big happy commune. By this reasoning group marriages will soon be the next social stigma which will need to be done away with. That should make everyone as caring and compassionate as they could ever hope to be.
But can you call a commitment to a plurality of sexual partners a marriage or are they mutilple marriages? You can call it a qualified type of a sexual relationship, but it is not a committed choice to be biological parents who will be fully responsible for the raising of a child. People really can not take a few genes from everybody in the marriage to produce a child, how unfortunate.
One man, one woman is how reproduction works, sorry if that makes anyone else feel left out or discriminated against by those who still think reproductive issues are biased against them.
What would have been much easier would be for us all to be full hermaphrodites from cradle to grave.
That would have helped make everyone as caring and compassionate as they could ever want to be.
We would all have found it much easier to fit into a society, or if not to just eliminate those we didn't get along with so we could start an entire new race from our own genes.
Karl, Karl Karl….
Allowing individuals to be who and what they are does not conversely result in requiring others to be who and what they are not. That is a false syllogism.
As to group marriages, there are many historical examples of them, and depending on the social circumstances in which they existed, they worked. The biggest barrier to them here, in this culture, is the opprobrium of the neighbors, who would condemn, ostracize, demand hearings before child welfare committees, and otherwise meddle so much as to make the possibility of such extended relationships untenable within the community. There have even been a few attempts as such "communal" groups in America (the Oneida commune in the early 19th century is a notable one) and they all pretty much fell apart because the folks outside the group couldn't stand it. (In the case of Oneida, despite the group living a considerable distance outside New York, a "concerned citizens group" trooped the twenty or thirty miles out there in order to burn it down.)
Why is it that people cannot just accept that some people want to live a different way? "My way or the highway" seems to be the social motto—and I am not referring just to Western examples. This is a universal human condition. I would say that, if you wanted to get over "primitive" cultural structures and make some progress, this would be one place to make a good start, since this sort of intolerance ties us to a tribal past that may have served smaller communities well back then but today are just burdens.
But you keep bringing this back to reproduction. Much as I am suspicious of personal anecdotes, I must rely on one here—I am fully heterosexual and I have been in a committed monogamous relationship with the same woman for 29 years. We did not marry in any formal way. And we have not reproduced. But what you seem to suggest, we ought not to have indulged in sex at all, since the choice to remain childless was made early. So on what basis could our mutual respect, love, and fidelity possibly exist? Well, we choose to be together. And I gotta say, the sex has been great—but aimed at mutual pleasure, not the propagation of the species. We do not fit into your models for what ought to be.
But let me restate, to be clear: I don't understand this formulation in which allowing people to live their own way somehow obligates everyone to live the same way. That's a nonsense equivalency.
So the God who created the mind is against the brainy?The God with the infinite,omnipresence,omnipotent, mind is jealous of the mere genius ? That's where the fool part comes in. The fool part is where the mind of the created says there is no God Mind.What did Jesus do that makes you not believe in God?
Dan writes:—"What did Jesus do that makes you not believe in God?"
Nothing. Not believing in god is my idea entirely, a conclusion arrived at after thinking about it for a long time.
A point, though—it is a mistake to say that this has anything to do with god. It has to do with his (or her) followers. A god that does not exist cannot sway you one way or the other, but those who insist on that god's reality and get surly with you when you choose to argue the point, well, they have everything to do with subsequent rejections.
Now, be mindful of this—whenever I talk about what "god" does or doesn't do, I in no way believe I'm talking about anything other than the assertions of human beings, whom I happen to feel are in error about this. But there's a shorthand involved—I talk about their god because they choose to believe in one replete with contradictions, meanness, irrationality, and pettiness. I just think this reflects what they want that god to be like…and by their actions, it seems pretty obvious they do.
It appears Mark does believe in "gods," its the "gods" that exist in the error prone perspectives of other people.
Only a purist like Mark can see the flaws of other people as a reason to reject the possibility of their actually being a god that the people really don't undertand very well.
Let's see, people can be unloving so a loving God can't exist. People can be snarly, so their God is also snarly. Sounds like a neat way to dismiss the possibility of any reason to have any altruistic principles at all that could in any shape or form actually be attributable to anything other than a human being or some other animal.
Good for you Mark, keep following that line of thinking and you'll be right back around the loop in less than second, it doesn't require a long time as you suggest. It may have taken you a while to come up with a logical device to keep honest evaluation of perpectives on an impersonal level, but in reality honest evealuation is never completed because one can never be able to come to a final conclusion when there is a lack of physical evidence either for or against the existence of a god.
Not sure why this discussion moved towards reproduction but since it did, someone answer this: if man was created in God's image, then why does God need a penis? Or is the whole "image" thing a metaphor?
Mark states –
"But let me restate, to be clear: I don’t understand this formulation in which allowing people to live their own way somehow obligates everyone to live the same way. That’s a nonsense equivalency."
I will state a simple analogy that will probably strike you as non-applicable but it is applicable in my mind.
Let's say that a group of individulas (two or more) come to the place where they make a decision based upon the values that they believe they share in common. That decision can vary likely affect more than just the original group of individuals.
Societies are made up of collections of individuals organized into larger and larger collective groups.
If you still think allowing people to live the way they want to doesn't eventually affect those who don't wish to live that way you are somehow mistaken that society is full of separate but equal moral beings (arranged into collective groups) who have the right to make their own decesions based upoo what they want, even ones that give other colective groups, no recourse.
Boards and CEOs can rob people blind for their own aggrandizement. The government can turn a once properous land into a debter nation. Activist judges can try to force others what to think and/or what not to talk about.
If you really think your decesion to not marry and to not have children could be the basis for a fully functioning human society with longevity in mind, I question the clarity of your thinking and the focus of your motivations.
You are married by the common law of most countries, but that probably means little to you. You have chosen to be a law unto yourselves, certainly not a problem for modern community organizers.
Karl writes:—"Let’s see, people can be unloving so a loving God can’t exist."
I didn't say that, Karl. Try understanding what I write.
People can be unloving and seem unable to do any damn thing about it. So they write about an unloving god and say that his "ways are mysterious and he has a plan" as a way to excuse the unlovingness. At the same time, since the god they've created really is that way, they have less responsibility for fixing their own lives.
Furthermore—"Sounds like a neat way to dismiss the possibility of any reason to have any altruistic principles at all that could in any shape or form actually be attributable to anything other than a human being or some other animal."
No, actually it brings the responsibility to be kind and generous foursquare back onto our shoulders, with no escape clause that renders us incapable of being any better than we are unless god intervenes. Since he clearly doesn't, we end up stuck with inexplicable badness that is part of "his" inscrutable plan.
My attitude is, stop blaming and/or crediting your assholeness on god (or lack thereof). You're a shit, you fix it. (Not you specifically, Karl, the generic You of such arguments.)
And finally:—"n reality honest evealuation is never completed because one can never be able to come to a final conclusion when there is a lack of physical evidence either for or against the existence of a god."
Well, yeah, duh! I've never said otherwise, because ultimately this argument hinges on a concept of Truth (capital T) and in my humble opinion, Truth is not a Fixed Thing but an ongoing process. So if that statement is meant somehow to put me in my place, all it really does is confirm my own idea about the nature of this whole mash-up, and no, you never come to a final conclusion.
Now let me ask you this: all of these debates circle around a definition of the nature of god. If we agree that recognition takes places in the human mind, the psyche, and that such recognition bears directly on what we perceive to be both real and true, and if the crux of the god question has to do with grasping a concept of living in the world that gives meaning and fulfillment, at least philosophically, then what real difference does it make—functionally—if the god you're believing in is entirely a construct of the psyche or is a big force with a personality outside ourselves? Is either one less "real" in the apprehension of the believer? And if the mental construct actually serves the same purpose as an externalized entity, why is it less true or less real?
See, all that nastiness and snarkiness I and others keep pointing out in the depiction of Yahweh have nothing to do with an externally extant being. To me, they exist as attributes because the writers were writing about themselves. As was the case with every other god ever constructed—human attributes externalized onto beings with no real existence outside the awareness (internal) of those who used said beings for their own personal and communal purposes. So, no, god isn't a snarky bastard—his followers are. God can't be because he doesn't exist outside their mutually-agreed-upon construct. He also can't be otherwise for the same reason.
But has evolved into something else over time because his believers have evolved. So in place of the slaughtering avenger, comes the peacemaking Jesus, etc.
God is a tautology, a self-referential icon that exists because people want it to. A swiss army knife concept.
But here's the thing, Karl—it works for those people.
We only get into difficulty when you who believe in the externalized existence of this bogeyman try to assert the accrued fictions regarding proper behavior on those of us who do not believe in him. And at the end of it all, if the only reason you can find for telling us to change our behavior is reference back to that same tautology, then you have nothing but ether to stand on.
But stop trying to pretend you don't see what I mean and make me out to be the delusional one. You want to believe all this stuff you espouse, bully for you. It's a choice, a conceit, a way for living in the world that works FOR YOU.
Frank,
Thank you, yes. Metaphor. Big bad masculine god for all the frat boys who want to keep the women in line.
More seriously, many ancient religions were female centered, the whole Gaia concept, with the Earth as the Mother Goddess. The early Hebrews (and others) came along and invented a studly male god to basically put Gaia in her place—maybe she is fertile and the source of all life, but she needs a MAN to impregnate her, thus metaphorically making men equal in creative capacity to women.
Give the whole magilla relating to progeny and making sure one's kids really are from "thine loins" and not from some other set of loins, and Yahweh making a big deal out of the Hebrew being his children, his Chosen People (as opposed to all those brats who were raised by single moms), possession of a penis is essential.
Consider how for so many males throughout history down unto even our present day, the ability to knock some woman up is the totality of their identity as A Man, it's not a stretch to say that the penis is the binding object of the trinity, all important and utterly necessary for any worthwhile god.
God doesn't need anything human/animalistic to be God.
You confuse this whole image thing, like many people do, by thinking that humans can imagine what God is like by looking at the physical essence of people.
God specifically warns against thinking that man should even consider it possible to make any "graven image" into a representation of God.
There is something about man that is made in the likeness of God, but it is not simply some physical naturalistic form. It is a spiritual aspect of man that is tri-part like God, At creation God speaking in the plural concerning God, says let us make man in our image.
God did not say he will make man in his image, God who is Spirit created the essence of man and breathed that life into the physical body he had prepared from the dust of the ground.
Although a human's physical nature is a part of their creation and life here on earth, we are not fully made into the image of God until after the physical is transformed and it no longer has a hold upon the fullness of a person's life which is spiritual and not simply physical.
This means jibberous to men of science who don't believe in matters of the spirit.
They are entitled to their opinion of course, and they know the US constitution says we are entitled to ours as well.
Karl writes:—"If you really think your decesion to not marry and to not have children could be the basis for a fully functioning human society with longevity in mind, I question the clarity of your thinking and the focus of your motivations."
I do understand your analogy, but not all decisions are equally volatile, and when you get down to the individual level it becomes idiotic. As for our decision being the basis for the society as a whole, you're being absurd. Many people WANT to have children. I rather doubt those of us who categorically do not constitute a majority under any circumstances. But the fact that those around us want children should not obligate us to also have them. Nor should our desire to be childless constitute an obligation for them not to. That's what I'm talking about.
For the purposes of discussion, Donna and I do consider ourselves married. But it is a condition extant between us requiring no mediation by state or religion to validate anything. We're in love. Period.
But that is clearly not the basis for a substantial number of relationships, today or in the past, and I will not argue the interpersonal specifics, but to point out that the full weight of social expectation has done more to force people to enter into and remain in loveless relationships than anything else, because the social body proper has always appeared to be a homogeneous concept requiring absolute adherence to its attributes on pain of expulsion.
Let's try something new.
My point is that if we get over the piss-shivers of heterosexual revulsion to two men or two women having sex with each and ask the simple question What is it about letting them live that way that would ever require us to DO that?
In fact, we do. There are no sex acts conducted by homosexuals that are not, to greater or lesser degrees, indulged by heterosexuals, according to personal taste. To be blunt, so the point isn't missed, if a woman is allowed to suck a man's cock, why wouldn't a man be allowed to do it? Is it the act or the participants that threatens the foundations of society? And if that act in a heterosexual context doesn't threaten anything, why would it in a homosexual context? (And it doesn't, despite what some puritanical alarmists may think—that's been going on for who knows how long and hasn't brought down a society yet.) And if a man may go down on a woman without it causing the end of civilization as we know it, why is a woman doing so any more threatening?
Oh. Kids. That's right. It's all about the kids. Blow-jobs—cunnilingus and felatio both—do not lead to procreation directly, therefore they are immoral therefore we are doomed.
We must agree to disagree if that is how you feel.
But—"If you still think allowing people to live the way they want to doesn’t eventually affect those who don’t wish to live that way you are somehow mistaken that society is full of separate but equal moral beings"
To be clear, I didn't say that. I didn't say "affect"—of course there is an affect. But there is also an effect to disallowing people to live their lives, and I would argue that the suppression that constitutes has a worse consequence on society.
I do not believe people are separate but equal moral beings. Two things about that: one, I believe everyone is POTENTIALLY morally equal, which is not the same thing. Second, the act of casting opprobrium on others because we disapprove of them binds us just as much as accepting differences—more so in the nascent conspiracy to deprive that renders all of us culpable in our intolerance.
On a practical matter, though, Karl, don't you think there are enough people on the planet? We're pushing seven billion and our sheer numbers are ruining the place. Backing off from that biblical-inspired bullshit about procreation might not be such a bad idea. Condemning people for not having kids (and no, you did not come out and actually do that, but you suggested strongly that we do not have full and meaningful lives as a result of our decisions) is perhaps just a bit blind just now. Obligating sex to be procreative and denigrating anything less, I think at this period literally means we're fucking ourselves out of a home.
Karl writes:—"God did not say he will make man in his image, God who is Spirit created the essence of man and breathed that life into the physical body he had prepared from the dust of the ground."
A-hem: Genesis 1:26 "God said 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves…"
Comment?
Image may be equivocal, but likeness? Stretching the point?
See, Karl, the easy way out here is to basically admit that the people who wrote all this really didn't know what they were talking about but did in fact conceive of their god—just like everyone else—in anthropomorphic terms.
And:—"This means jibberous to men of science who don’t believe in matters of the spirit."
You have no basis on which to make that claim. Matters of the spirit can mean many things to different people. You tie it to one thing and that one thing comes loaded with a whole suite of physical claims for substantiation and all science does is demonstrate that those physical claims are bogus. Does this mean they have (a) dismissed the spirit or (b) would even want to?
They don't see it the way you do. That is not grounds to say "spirit" is jibberish to them. That was petty and insulting.
Lastly:—"by thinking that humans can imagine what God is like by looking at the physical essence of people."
No, we claim to know something about your god by looking at the emotional essence of people. Therein lies the connection.
Karl's comments indicate the fallacy of so much biblical thinking – that we must all believe the same things and behave the same way. If you believe, Mark, that not having children is the right choice for you, you must therefore believe it is the right choice for everyone AND you must believe that everyone should feel the same way. So obviously, you must be hoping for the demise of human life.
If you believe that God doesn't exist, you must believe that everyone else should believe the same thing. And since "true" believers refuse to accept that any good can exist in the world without God, they therefore believe that you wish for all good to disappear and evil to eat to the world alive. Right?
Karl, can you not possibly see the ridiculousness of your thinking? And did you not understand that even as Mark believes that God exists from the imagination of believers, he also sees that the cultural constructs built upon those beliefs are real and serve real purposes to those who believe it? Did you not read that he is more than willing to accept it as 'real' for you and other believers, AS LONG AS YOU DO NOT INSIST YOUR REALITY MUST BECOME THE REALITY OF EVERYONE ELSE!!!!!!!!!!!
How hard is that? If you want to sit in your churches and feel great pity for everyone who does not believe as you do, then so be it. And then, let it go. Let others go where they so choose. LIVE the compassion and acceptance of others that Jesus supposedly taught, and let others decide for themselves. My guess is that if more Christians would just shut up and let their actions speak of their faith, they'd have more people curiously seeking out the foundation of their lovely lives and thus finding the Christian community a viable choice. THOSE are the Christians to be admired, not the charlatans of doomsaying hate-mongering who profess to be the spokespeople for your religion.
Just as I said, societies are not formed simply by individuals with their own rights to do what ever they think is okay for them and their close significant others. What you espouse for yourself you in essence would wish for anyone else and this technically has no point of demarcation from the rest of society as a whole.
Five out of fifty, six out of fifty, fifty one percent, sixty seven percent; all just number but very much related to the perspective of acheiving societal approval/change because that's what the message seems to be.
People claim to like those "Christians who shut up and let them do whatever they want." Why do you think we have the mess we have right now in our nation, both politically and financially? That is not a loving caring persepective, that is a down your throat even if you don't like it perspective.
Mindy says it all,
"My guess is that if more Christians would just shut up and let their actions speak of their faith, they’d have more people curiously seeking out the foundation of their lovely lives and thus finding the Christian community a viable choice. THOSE are the Christians to be admired, not the charlatans of doomsaying hate-mongering who profess to be the spokespeople for your religion."
Any religion has reasons why they love other people. Most here on DI seem to think its because you have a right to treat them like doormats. Then they really know how to love their neighbors as along as thye let them do and say whatever they darn well choose to do and say.
My comment was in response to the guy with the question regarding why the imagery of God with male reproductive organs.
Read my statement :—) ”God did not say HE will make man in HIS image, God who is Spirit created the essence of man and breathed that life into the physical body he had prepared from the dust of the ground.”
The statement was a plural declarative statement. Let US make man in OUR own image, in the likeness of ourselves. God's essence is a relationship among the plurality of the Godhead, "trinity" for those who use the term as such.
God's essence is an inter-relationship no matter how you try to describe it from human terms. Even man's thoughts and emotions and will separately can not be likened unto this concept. The relationship is the key descriptor of man's image and likeness that are in the likeness of God. If you can consider that a person needs to interweave and use the various aspects of their personality, consciousness and will to make decisions, you should be able to see how motivations are a key part of a persons spiritual identity.
I can only evaluate what others consider to be their understanding of the image of God based upon what I understand about spiritual relationships. Sorry if you believe that I presumes too much from your perspective. I can try to clarify my perspective better.
Karl says: "What you espouse for yourself you in essence would wish for anyone else and this technically has no point of demarcation from the rest of society as a whole."
No. That is NOT true, unless what I espouse for myself is simply the freedom to live true to myself while abiding by the Golden Rule. No victimization. Compassion for others.
But I am fully cognizant of the fact that my private choices are only mine, and that others make very different ones. How I discipline my children, what I eat, who I sleep with or don't, who I choose for friends, what I read – all of those things are my own personal choices that I in no way expect anyone else to (necessarily) agree with or follow.
A society can exist by agreeing on a few basic standards, one of which is that we are free to live differently from each other. We are free to learn about each other's cultures and religions and then free to embrace them or not. We are not free to hurt one another. We are not free to victimize others. And we are not free to impose our wills upon the unwilling, except to prevent victimization.
When I said that people might be drawn to learn about the lovely lives of Christians if they shut up and LIVE their faith, I was referring, which I believe I mentioned earlier in the comment, to living as Christ lived – loving and accepting of all, with compassion as the primary motivation of all action. Those who live like that are the kind of people others are drawn to, regardless of their faith.