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Apathy encourages entitlement. This is why I do not let people get away with "I'll pray for you" or "blessing you/have a blessed day". This whole concept of pushing your gawd onto others is a direct form of entitlement. Can you imagine if you said to them "May Satan come into your heart" or "Allah has plans for you"? They would shit bricks.

I do not encourage this kind of entitlement behavior by letting it pass. It's unacceptable and is the root of, "America is a Xtian nation" push.

Once you let any intrusiveness pass they just want even more and then they have more power to force their beliefs on you. Before long they'll take all the power and use it to abuse. History has shown this time and time again.
Entitlements stops here.

How do you feel about religious entitlement and do you speak up?

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NoPlanetB 8 Oct 14
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7 comments

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“Have a blessed day” is SO condescending

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Life is too short to be upset about or attempt to control what other people wish or believe. So long as they don't hate or control me, I don't pursue the fool's errand of trying to disabuse them of their notions. However I have pretty good boundaries and I will enforce them. That's separate from trying to counter or change them though. It's not even really relevant to religion. I don't let asshats -- religious or not -- be shitty to me. But expressing a vacuous desire for divine blessing on my behalf is not being shitty. It is in fact either a behavioral tick or a mild well-wishing. By itself it cannot offend or bother me.

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I have no interest in arguing with a cashier or receptionist. i'll tell people who know i'm an atheist not to deliberately push their beliefs on me, even in "small" ways, but i don't know if a stranger has ever met an atheist before. i'm not going to be that asshole that confirms the stereotypes they've been taught. and i just generally don't want to be an asshole.

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Everyone has a god, or several, that they push in front of themselves wherever they go. Every conscious human carries a conceptual placeholder which represents their understanding of the highest power they are unavoidably subject to.

Mine, for example, is my concept of the entirety of reality as delineated by my understanding, such as it is, of science, combined with my experience of life. I cannot overpower it or escape its laws in life or in death. It created me and it will finish me.

Some people imagine there is no power greater than themselves. This seems profoundly shortsighted to me, not to mention scientifically untenable. But selfgodding is growing in popularity.

May your day be liberated by the resolution of your understanding to that which is real.

skado Level 9 Oct 14, 2019

@NoPlanetB
No one can speak for others, but everyone can have an opinion about others. This is how it appears to me. I, like everyone else (not speaking for them, but in my opinion) can always be mistaken. I welcome any science-based critique.

@NoPlanetB
Everything that comes out of anybody’s mouth is just their opinion, whether that opinion happens to be true or false. I don’t see any need to encumber our written or spoken language with disclaimers that would apply to everything. I wouldn’t require you to warn the reader that it was only your opinion that “I am someone and I don't” because I accept that that is how it appears to you, even though I think that the sciences of psychology and linguistics, among others, might see it differently.

@NoPlanetB
When you double down on your mistakes, you do not lose all credibility with me. I assume you are a reasonable human being who happens to see things differently from me, and I become curious to learn why, and remain open to dialogue, and open to new insights about my own errors.

But insights don’t come from being told you’re wrong; they come, if they come at all, from sharing the details of the thinking we use to arrive at our conclusions, and being willing to see things from perspectives we may not have considered before.

@NoPlanetB
What you have done, in summary (correct me where I’m wrong) is to declare your belief that expressions of goodwill that show evidence of a religious worldview come from a sense of entitlement, and if they are met with anything but rebuke, they will contribute to an unacceptable power imbalance that favors the religious. And you have asked for other people’s views on this idea.

When I shared my view that, from a certain perspective, everyone’s worldview contains a concept of ultimate power, you declared that I can’t speak for everybody.

When I agreed that no one can, and invited evidence-based criticism of my view, you declared that my view was simply false, denied that your declaration needed the support of scientific thinking, and advised me on how my self-expression “should” be formatted.

When I rationally defended my casual formatting, and volunteered that I wouldn’t hold you to any stricter form than I hold myself to, you accused me of “doubling down” and declared that my defense was UNreasonable, without showing me why by illustrating a reasonable alternative, and yet claimed it was my unreasonableness that undermined my credibility.

When I said I’d be much more lenient with you in the hopes of coming to a mutual understanding, and suggested that you give me more to work with than just declarations of my wrongness, you declared that you had, and declared it was my fault for not seeing it, all still devoid of illustrations, explanations, or evidence other than that you say so. And that is the excuse you use to exit a conversation you invited.

I hope you’ll forgive my insistence on holding your feet to the fire in a conversation you initiated about holding people’s feet to the fire. If you should happen to choose to reenter the conversation, I’d be happy to hear you explain why, rather than declare that, I’m wrong. Otherwise, I’ll accept that you have lost interest in pursuing the conversation further. Thanks.

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If anyone attempts to proselytize with me, I make it clear that I am not interested.

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I choose to assume it’s just their way of wishing me well, and usually say something like, “you too.”

skado Level 9 Oct 14, 2019
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I mostly talk about Religion online because it is such a red flag in bussiness and in person.

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