What I find disturbing is the way that they discount the feelings of non-Christians and ex-Christians as being of no account. It's as though they regard non-theists as deficient in some way. Well, the 'as though' is probably superfluous.
I think there's a signal difference in approach though - whereas for someone like Alan both ex-Christians and never-were-Christians are blinded to the truth by Satan, ex-Christians have the added cachet of never having been true Christians at all in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't have ceased to be Christians. I mean, it's obvious, right?
A thought which has been growing larger in my mind recently based on a number of posts by a (mercifully small) number of different posters is how obnoxious to others as well as presumably personally miserable religion seems to make some people. I would have hoped that as well as providing a worldview, a religion at its best would enlarge a person's mind, make them broader of outlook, more open-minded, more generous of spirit, more giving, more tolerant, more accepting, bigger and wider of head and heart. In certain cases the exact opposite of all these things seems to be in place - it seems to make people rigid, shrill, narrow, crabbed and generally noxious; smaller rather than larger. Whether such people would be as repellent without religion as with it, or whether it's a narrow, inflexible, closed-minded and closed-handed dogma that does it, is difficult to tease out. There's that famous (and for once seemingly true rather than apocryphal) story about the almost impossibly vile Evelyn Waugh, who was asked once how he could be so utterly repugnant a human being while professing to be a Catholic. Oh, just imagine what I would be like if I were not a Catholic, he's said to have replied. "Just think how awful I'd be otherwise" doesn't strike me as much of a recommendation, I have to say. It doesn't seem to have brought him any generosity of spirit or peace of mind, which is what I'd expect of any religious adherence worth its salt, and the same seems to go for more than a few here. The line from an unhappy person to a cruel, mean-spirited and vindictive person is perhaps a little bit too neat and a little bit too pat - in Ben Goldacre's favourite phrase, which I love, "I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that" -, but the posters I have in mind don't seem like happy people at peace with themselves let alone others. The belief in a loving God of goodness that they proclaim doesn't seem to extend to instilling either of those qualities.
Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.
