Why would churches endorse pedophiles and rapists? Hmmm I wonder...
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Did you go onto an atheist forum and try to argue that god is real? That's their space. What kind of welcome did you expect?
No I didn't do that. What I did is offer that I have, via meditation, experienced some stuff roughly corresponding to some religious stuff. And invited conversation.
Yeah, the response has been less than open minded.
Do you mean you went to an online forum full of atheists and offered up woo for critical analysis? Did you think they weren't going to tear that apart for examination and point out the flaws? That's what they do. Many atheists carry trauma from religious upbringings filled with intense spiritual experiences. They have already dismissed them as fraudulent emotional manipulation, and are on red alert against more of it.
Look, there are atheists who welcome that sort of discussion, but online atheist forums are echo chambers. That's where you find the angry ones. Theists barge in there every day and rile them up. They've got their arguments locked and loaded, with fingers on triggers. They're eager to destroy unwarranted beliefs. Eventually they might mellow out and leave the forum, but you're gonna have difficulty identifying chill atheists in the wild, especially if you lead with woo. We're trying to be content and just let you have whatever harmless beliefs you like. We've realized how much of a pain in the ass it is to try and change minds.
Shredding ideas down to their most basic parts, examining, then rebuilding what works while discarding what doesn't is the very definition of fairness and open-mindedness. It might be painful, but that's how we grow. Ideas stand and fall on their own merits. Our emotional connection to an experience is how bias is defined, and we cannot expect others to simply accept our version of reality without evidence.
Like, I've had a ghost experience, as an atheist. I didn't believe in ghosts then, and you know what? I still don't believe in them now. Brains just do weird things, and there's no good reason to blindly trust our own perceptions.
I like the willingness to engage. But ya, that is no substitute for sane navigation of those emotions