re: #1025 motorcycleboy

We must tolerate their holding of religious beliefs so long as the practice of those beliefs does not interfere with other constitutional rights. Do you tolerate religion? To say you ‘[do not] have to respect their religion’ could be an admission that you are intolerant when you encounter the articulation of a belief system that counters the atheist view (which is, in itelf, a belief system). Do you? Is it?

I respect the right of other people to hold anti-scientific views that are empirically provable as false, in the face of overwhelming counterfactual evidence - for instance, the Genesis Literalist dogma that the Universe, the Earth, and all the tens of millions of existent and extinct species found within it were created independently and as is a few thousand years ago - but I am not required to respect the views themselves. Nor do I think much of the decision by the people who hold them to embrace willful ignorance. But they are free to do that to themselves. When they try to legislatively mandate that it be done to other peoples’ kids, they have crossed a constitutional line.

Are there places or circumstances you suddenly become intolerant of the faithful?

Yep. When they try to unconstitutionally force the sectarian indoctrination of other peoples’ kids into their pet religious dogmas in public high school science classes.

Do I have to remind you the Judeo-Christian ethic is the foundation of our legal system?

The constitutional construction of our nation owes as much to the Pagan Greco-Roman tradition as it does to the judeo-Christian tradition.

If God is not the creator, then who or what is the creator?

You’re assuming without empirical evidence that there was one, and only one.

“…to worship not at all…” Of course! But making a practice of killing the mockingbird is hardly ‘respect’, and is indeed the opposite of respect. Those atheists that pursue the faithful among us are guilty of intolerance for the holding of a belief system that disagrees with atheism. You can’t leave your beliefs in the church, synagogue, or, dare I say, mosque, if you are a true believer.

It is, as far as I have seen, the Judeo-Christians who cannot manage to forbear falsely and gratuitously slandering and sliming atheists, agnostics and secularists as, among other things, fascists, communists, relativists, and ethically and/or morally deficient.

If you believe in God then you are a ‘creationist’ on some level. In God We Trust!

Nope. That’s assuming, without empirical evidence, that being God means having to be the Universe’s creator. Bit those are two distinct conceptions. The very idea of the ristotelian Prime Mover ddid not involve such creation; the Greeks believed that the Universe was always here, and the Prime Mover just set the pre-existent Cosmos in motion.

People of faith — at least the reasonable ones — respect one another’s faith. It’s the misapplication of faith that upsets true believers.

People should respect each other’s right to hold any particular religious belief, or none at all. This is, however, quite distinct from respecting the beliefs themselves. If people admire another way of believing besides their own a lot, they are always free to convert to it. When they don’t, in the absence of coercion, it is an indication that they respect their own belief system most of all - which means they respect other belief systems less.