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Originally Posted by Tore
As an atheist, I still think it's sad sometimes how it's often hard to discuss religion because it so often degenerates into aggression, finger pointing or, even worse, insults. In this thread, writing that you get the impression religious people are more often ****s, does that really promote any kind of respectful, intelligent discussion on the subject? I think not. Too often, people treat such discussions merely as competitions they want to win, sometimes by any means necessary.
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I think that one thing that can be said for theists and atheists alike is that there is no standard motivation for disbelief/belief. In other words, there are Christians who's primary motivation for their faith is the notion that if they follow Jesus and do everything that they're supposed to do they will go to heaven; These
tend to be the pricks that people run into, because when you put yourself in the position of trying to do everything right so that you can "win the prize", your initial reaction when you see someone who's happy doing whatever they want is, "well, that person is going to hell". There are Christians who simply at some point in their life found that they could not surmount whatever obstacles life presented them, so they had to turn to something greater than themselves and found that the ensuing dynamic/relationship with god really merited continuing to follow on that path, there are also Christians who have been steeped in the religion since birth, so Christianity forms the entire infrastructure of their reality.
Conversely, there are atheists that do not believe in the existence of an anthropomorphic deity, yet still have some sort of spirituality. There are atheists who's reason for not believing in the existence of a deity is caused by a personal event that lead them to their belief that because of said occurrence, there must not be a god. There are others, materialists, who simply do not believe in what cannot be empirically proven, apprehended with the five senses, or arrived at through sound reasoning.