Hi Mary, I'm interested in your question,
> When you live down here you quickly learn to cater to religious people. You > sort of pander like a sycophant. It's the safest way. I've been prayed > over, invited to "pack the pew" night, looked at askance, and maligned at > various times over the years enough to know it's best just to not bring it > up at all, and if you get backed into a corner, just smile sweetly and lie, > lie, lie your way out of it. Why is this so? > one of my favorite questions, why. But I'm not sure in this case which "why" you are seeking. Why do they invite you and seek group conformity so hard? That's not hard to understand, it's a common enough phenomena in group formation, the attempt to convert the outsider to "the way". There's a self-perpetuating system to social groups that's easy to comprehend in an intellectual way. Woo hoo! Intellect can be such fun! Or do you wonder why you react the way you do? Deflecting rather than confronting or trying to convert them to your view, even though they are in the majority? Straighten that out for me and I'll do my best to answer your query. I'm sort of curious as to how you notice lying. Does it bother you to lie? Do you see morality as existing separate from religion and how do you define for yourself what is good and not good? In my family I have this one uncle who makes a big deal about being an atheist. When I was a teenager, I sent his daughter, my cousin Beth a poster of Robert Plant that I bought at a Led Zeppelin concert and he threw it away! I was highly offended. I wondered where an atheist gets off all moralistic? Maybe because they recognize that without values life would be dangerously chaotic and so those he "feels" are important are all the more fundamental to his ego. I know he feels it incumbent to send my mom, his sister, links and articles about the logic and benefit of atheism. I'm pretty sure she sends him links and articles about the logic and benefit of Christianity. So they dialogue this way. This morning, I stopped by her house and she mentioned uncle Bob, and that she'd gotten so fed up with Bob's needling and hurtful rejection of her God, that she prayed for permission to just give up on him. That is, unless the Lord sent her a clear sign, she'd just have nothing to do with him anymore. As soon as she got up off the floor the phone rang and it was her brother Bob calling who said, Hey sis, I just wanted to call and let you know how much I love you. My ma slammed the phone down and cursed, Damn, now i'm gonna have to put up with that atheist son of bitch forever, because of God. So I think in the main, it's a good idea to stay an atheist because God makes you do stuff you really don't want to do. Take care, John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
