A few days after posting her personal bleg, JMPP posted an explanation about her no-religion policy. Now, as I said in comments over there, I think she’s painting with far too wide a brush: because not all religionists are weird nutters who’ll try to convert you. Full disclosure: my girlfriend is a believer, and I used to be (many moons ago), so I’m pretty familiar with Christianity in many of its variants. Generally speaking, most believers will leave you alone about it if you ask them to, which is good enough for me.
That said, some of her commenters are shining examples of exactly what’s wrong with religionists these days. It’s like they’re trying to make the rest of us angry with them. For example:
The dynamic behind all rejection of God and His Word is the same as it always was, sin. Post-modernism has forced something new in between the sinner and his redemption and that’s the rejection of the concept of sin. These Randian objectivists and other assorted “deep thinkers” I like to refer to as the “Walking Dead” have two mountains to climb. The first, two hundred years of “Enlightened Thought” that has left them without a star or compass to guide them through a wilderness of ism’s and second, the natural disinclination to do some soul searching and a private inventory of failure (sin) and the causes.
Yeah, that’s exactly it jackass. Or it could be that many of us who’ve rejected your mythical belief in what essentially boils down to Voodoo/Witchcraft/Magic (the only difference being that your religion is based on some old scrolls in Hebrew & Greek) are turned off by your condescending attitude and your categorical smugness. These same behaviors can be found in Evangelical Atheists, and from anybody it’s incredibly annoying.
If you want more people to join your exceedingly large cult, try being nice to them and, perhaps, maybe setting a good example through living by the damn rules your belief structure sets down. Being a jerk isn’t going to win any converts, and it isn’t going to make those of us who don’t believe any more likely to want to be your friend.
