Monday, December 3, 2012

Let's Talk about Respect

One of the most thrown out lines that the religious use is “you have to respect my beliefs”, whenever a religious debate is ongoing. But do we really have to respect their religion or are they just as deluded in this belief as they are in everything else regarding their superstitious nonsense?


So, what exactly do we have to respect? The simple answer to the question is almost nothing. Respect is earned, not given. Religion. on it's own merits, has earned absolutely zero level of respect. Science has stripped the ignorance of the bible of it's validity, from the age of the earth to the origins of the humans species. Religion has been proven wrong in all of it's assertions without a shadow of a doubt, unless of course you are Ken Hamm or some other lunatic who is just too fucking stupid to understand these facts.

Religion has done much to lose the respect of the human race through it's use of violence and fear in spreading it's doctrines and suppression of scientific knowledge and truth. Any place where religion has held a foothold in government, human advancement has been stymied. The dark ages are a prime example of what religion does when it has power – 1000 years were lost because of religious ignorance. The middle east was a leader in mathematics and science right up until islam got it's foot in the door and everything came to a screaming halt. There can be no rational argument that religion is anything other than a negative force in human advancement.

The honest truth is that we do not have to respect religion because religion has done nothing worthy of garnering respect in the first place. There is one thing, though, that we should respect and that is an individual's right to believe. That is it! We are under no compunction to respect anything outside a person's right to believe no matter how insane, ignorant or hateful those beliefs are. The important fact that the religious must accept is that we have the same right to not believe in their nonsense and speak out about it in whatever manner we so choose.

The religious argue that we shouldn't care that they think that we are going to hell or will be eternally punished for not following their particular belief system since we don't believe we are going there anyway. That's a piss poor argument for what is essentially nothing more than passive aggressive speech and telling us that we are evil for not being just like them. If they are going to use this argument, then they shouldn’t bitch and moan about how we have to respect their beliefs when we tell them that we think they are hateful individuals living in ignorance believing outdated bronze-age nonsense. Let us also not forget that the argument of the non-beleiver or heretic being evil has been and is still used for the persecution of human beings for no other crime that disagreeing on what superstitious system is valid or not. So yeah, we should all be pissed off when some religious fuck tells us we are going to hell because they have a long standing history of helping to send “heretics” there sooner than later based upon this assertion.

Let's be crystal clear here, it's a 2-way street and until these people start respecting our right to not have their ignorance shoved in our faces and not be told how evil we are with their passive aggressive bullshit, we are under no compunction to be polite or say that they are anything more than the backwards-assed ignoramuses they really are. Just as they don't have to respect our lack of beliefs we don't have to respect their superstitions either. Sadly, the one thing that atheists do respect, that the religious do not, is the right of others to believe what they want. If only the religious would learn to respect that one thing and leave the rest of us alone there would be a lot less contention between us. What they don't appear to comprehend is that as long as they are pushing their religion on us, we are going to fight back and tell them how full of shit and ignorant they really are. Once they learn to worship and believe on their own time and in their own space, we won't have a need to fight the religious.

Until that time when they stop knocking on my door, trying to push their lunacy into public schools and government and stop telling me and people like me how evil we are, every last one of these deluded individuals can expect to get a sound “fuck you and your beliefs” as my response to their proselytizing. Will I ever respect their beliefs? Nope, but I will, unlike them, continue to think they have the right to believe what they like, no matter how stupid and ignorant it is.

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