Abandon all rationality ye who enter Yahoo!Answers Religion and Sprituality section.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here it is in a nutshell: you ask questions on various topics from religion to growing azaleas and other people answer. Each answer has a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down feature. If you agree with another person's answer there is a nifty thumbs up button you can click on. And there is the yin to its yang, the equally nifty thumbs down button, if you disagree with the answer.
The problem is, giving others' answers thumbs up or down is now essentially meaningless in R&S (Religion and Spirituality). It was meant to be a way to say "this answer is good" or "I don't agree so much". What it has become, sadly, is a way to make other people (the ones you recognize as generally opposed to your points of view) look bad. If certain angry evangelicals recognize you as an atheist, your answers get thumbs down on sight; likewise if you have a reputation for being a theist, some ticked off atheists give you thumbs down without ever reading what you wrote. (I've done various experiments on this, the details of which I'll spare you, but rest assured that I know this happens.)
I tend to accumulate what is known in the trade as veritable buttloads of thumbs down on R&S because I’m stuck in the crossfire coming from both camps; I'm a liberal gay Christian and lots of R&S people don't believe that such an abomination can exist, except as a spineless fence-sitting jellyfish. I'll let you picture that mixed metaphor for a minute.
R&S is a big place. I mean really big. I'm sure tens of thousands of people go there daily, which means even if you post multiple answers every day, not everyone will see all of them. They see the few, if any, that they stumble on periodically, and that means that Fred Fundamentalist reads one pro-Christian answer I posted and thinks, Aha! Jon M is a fundamentalist / Calvinist / evangelical like me.
Later, Annie Atheist tells about her experience of church as nothing but Republican politics with a pious face, something I strongly agree is a major problem with religion in the US. When I post an answer supporting her and/or adding to her thoughts, woe be unto me if Fred and friends see it. They write me very unhappy notes. (Sometimes I kinda enjoy them because they can be unintentionally funny; one guy told me I was a "trader" to Christianity and numerous others have accused me of being in various ways under the influence of "Satin".) I get Revelation 3:16 thrown at me a lot. Apparently, not agreeing with their opinions about God makes me by definition "lukewarm" and worthy of spewing from the divine mouth. Yawn.
The point is that the most of the people there are asking one basic question; "What do you believe and is that theistic or atheistic?" My thumbs down magnetism comes fitting neither definition, at least considering the usual R&S level of philosophical / theological understanding on any given school night. I get thumbs down from evangelicals who assume I'm an atheist, and more thumbs down from select atheists who think all Christians are evangelical blind-faithists. I am a one-man fence-sitting jellyfish thumbs-down magnet. And kids, I can't tell you how much sleep I've lost and how many crocodile tears I've shed over those thumbs down. I really, really can't. Oh, wait. I can: zero.
A cursory glance will show you that R&S really is a war zone; atheists diss Christians, Christians smugly condemn atheists, everybody disses the poor Muslims, and the Pagans watching it all with a kind of bemused pity. All of us assume the other guys have the same definition of the word "God," but it is strikingly clear from my vantage point that we don't. Maybe we're all using the same names for Him but extremely few of us share the same idea of who He is. So whatever the faults of R&S, I'm glad it offers the chance to ask this basic, unaswerable question: "Why do you believe what you believe?”
In my life, that is a huge and mentally dizzying question that really does bear asking over and over again. Everybody over the age of, like, 15 should ask himself that question every day just for the sake of basic mental health, if not spiritual growth. Knowing why you believe, knowing what the attitudes are that prop up your beliefs, knowing the motives behind those attitudes, is way way WAY more important than what you believe, because blind and unquestioned faith isn't faith at all. It might be superstition, self delusion, political manipulation or various other oily things, but it's not faith.
Sometimes I don't know how to answer some of the people who ask me about my faith. When they ask me if I’m a theist or an atheist I hesitate to answer because it depends on their idea of who God is. To the extremist Calvinists (the ones who like talking about God's wrath but never about His healing love) or the fundamentalists (who prefer asking you if you are "saved" rather than dealing with you on a real, loving basis) I should say that I'm an atheist. Something like, "From your perspective, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in -- much less follow -- your god. He is mean, petty, vindictive, and just happens to hate all the people that you hate. I luckily have no personal experience of his existence and I wouldn’t follow him if I did."
I do believe in the God I find in the gospels, though. He's the one Christ said was love. If I think you're talking about Him, then yes: I am an enthusiastic theist, a Bible-based Christian, a Catholic whose glutes are rounded and firm from years of genuflecting. That God is as different as a HumVee is to a tricycle to the god Pat Robertson says condemns anybody who isn't a Baptist, or the one Bill O'Reilly says is a conservative, or the one that Glen Beck invokes to hate whoever doesn't promote his political agenda. If that’s the sad little god you’re talking about, then slap a "Hi! I'm an atheist!" tag on me and call me Richard Dawkins.
He doesn’t deserve my belief or my devotion because it's comically obvious that he is a sock puppet for some kind of politics. He is the reason people leave religion in droves and why monstrosities like “prosperity gospels” and “culture wars” exist. His one great draw is that he’s easy; all he asks is that you judge people who disagree with your opinions and condemn them to eternal hell. That’s always easier and a lot less scary than humility, introspection, and questioning your faith, the stuff that the love of Christ calls us to in the gospels.
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