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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Absolutely. As I mentioned several times over, the vast majority of atheists are extremely tolerant of Christians holding whatever religious views they want, so long as they do so privately. Once again, non-believers are only angered when Christians bring their beliefs into the public sphere, such as trying to legislate their own morality or trying to teach Christian views in public schools. You'd be very hard-pressed to find an atheist who wants to actively persecute someone based on religion.
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Granted, but isn't that going down the slippery slope against the freedom of expression. Don't take your religion out of your house and into public. Don't parade your sexuality.
On the school thing, in Canada you have a choice of schools so you can send your kid to a christian school or a Muslim school. Or are you saying that overall we should legislate the teaching of bible studies out of any school and deny people from making a choice based on thier own beliefs?
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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Hear, hear! Now go spread that message to the evangelical Christians who spend extradinary amounts of time and money lobbying governments to adopt laws that confirm with their religious views and have their beliefs taught in public schools.
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As I've said in previous posts, I'm on board with that, but again now your talking about that whole slippery slope debate again. Can you really outright deny or ban a person his religious views no matter how extreme. Do we as individuals in a free state have the right to condemn someone for believe too hard. Now of course we need to seperate out extremist from violent extremism, but thats the only place where society as a group has a right to interject its majority beliefs.
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Originally Posted by MarchHare
If you accept that certain portions of the Bible may have been exaggerated myths, isn't that opening a huge can of worms? At what point do you accept that everything in the Bible was a myth?
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See you might have me there, in this kind of debate, however it comes down to viewpoints and when you have a right to slam somebodies view points, one mans belief in myths is another mans beliefs in absolute truths. Personally I believe that there is a hint of truth in every story in the bible as long as you believe in mans ability to exagerate to get his point across. Remember that the bible could be interepreted as flawed only because its a document about God written by his most flawed creation in man.
Also, for what it's worth, the Vatican has adopted the position that, given the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution, it is now the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church to believe that evolution was the process by which God created life on Earth. To me, this seems like a very reasonable stance. The theory of evolution doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a God, but it doesn't require one either.
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Originally Posted by MarchHare
You'll find that it's the opposite that is true more often than not; it's the non-believers who are burned (quite literally throughout history!) at the stake. Atheists have been denied positions of leadership for decades. How many American presidents, for example, have been anything other than a practicing Christian? The majority of US citizens are believers, and thus the voters have a bias against electing an atheist, even if he or she is supremely qualified for the position.
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Its not a matter of denial, its a matter of democracy isn't it. If the majority of voters don't feel that a person is suitable or jives with societies beliefs then he's not going to win an election. Or are we going to have to start appointing leaders based upon an even representation of thier belief systems, and if so isn't that subverting democracy itself.
Interesting points tho.