[danielheath]

This hypothetical Mr X is going to take all of a week to get the entire helpdesk & IT procurement team (and every religious coworker) to avoid him and his need to criticize some aspect of their lives.

That's "toxic" because now you have a staff member who people won't communicate effectively with.

[bill_mon]

Now you're inventing more personality for Mr X. He doesn't like Microsoft and doesn't hide it. He thinks Santa Claus is for children and doesn't hide it. He's not the problem here.

[mckirk]

He is, though, because his opinion on Santa Claus should be completely irrelevant to his interactions with his co-workers. But if he prioritizes being hostile by correcting and insulting people over being humble and accepting that others might believe differently, he is being toxic -- he's poisonous to be around.

There are different ways to stand by one's beliefs. One is to keep them to yourself and let them guide your decisions silently, but defend them vigorously if they are actively challenged. And one is to feel the need to rub them into everyone's face constantly, because there is only Right and Wrong and you can't deal with somebody being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you) without feeling personally attacked and going on the offensive.

[bill_mon]

I can agree. But this means that we can never talk about anything other than specific, technical issues at work. We can never reveal any opinion or outside fact about anything. I suppose that's a solution.

In this scenario, our guy wouldn't accept that others might believe differently, because he'd never know, because they never say. Fine by me.

> being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you)

That's not what wrong means. Opinions are personal and subjective and can't be wrong or right. Religious ideas a not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.

[mckirk]

I think the agreed-upon way of handling this is revealing personal opinions on difficult subjects very carefully to gauge the reactions, and only proceeding if doing so wouldn't disturb the peace more than what the discussion would be worth. There are of course a ton of potentially difficult subjects, as the ever expanding "Culture War" Wikipedia article shows[1].

But after thinking about it for a bit, this approach of "tread carefully and don't disturb others" is still problematic. Because, where do you draw the line about things that you should or should not speak up against? My intuitive example would have been an anti-vaxxer at work, that I probably would have felt the need to criticize and correct, because their opinion might kill my grandma. But then, militant atheists might also feel like they have to criticize believers, given the huge number of people killed in the name of one god or another.

I think a fundamental factor here is the level of confidence in one's belief that is warranted. Challenging others (especially publicly) on what they believe should only be seen as a sensible thing to do when the confidence in your opinion that leads to to that criticism is warranted. For things like vaccinations, we thankfully have scientific evidence that would indicate that anyone who outright believes they are ineffectual or "give people autism" is, in all likelihood, simply wrong. On the other hand, a belief in god ultimately can't ever be shown as wrong[2], so being very confident in your belief that there is no god still doesn't justify putting down others for believing the opposite.

> That's not what wrong means.

Yes sorry, that was meant fairly tongue-in-cheek, because I assumed that for a person like our Mr. X, the distinction between "of a different opinion" and "wrong" would be very blurry.

> Religious ideas are not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.

Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

2: Unless we talk about ridiculous stuff like creationism, which would at least be very hard to defend if you simultaneously want to use the scientific method for anything.

[bill_mon]

Treading carefully is probably our best bet, but it's very difficult and error prone.

There are no militant atheists, in any reasonable sense of the word. If mentioning facts about the world is seen as criticism of religious people, that's a big problem. We know vaccines work, because our best research shows that. It's not controversial and we should be free to mention it. Huge parts of many religious text are factually incorrect, we know that from enormous amounts of research -- this is also not controversial and we should be free to talk about it.

> Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?

In that case everything is opinion and we have no real knowledge of anything.

Thanks!

[sshumaker]

Virtually no one is an atheist, if you take the Sapiens definition of religion: “a system of human laws and values, which is founded on a belief in a super human order." (Super human orders are not the product of human whim or human agreements, unlike e.g. the laws of soccer) https://sites.google.com/site/taborsapiens/home/10-the-law-o...

If you read the book it’s clear communism, fascism, democracy and capitalism are really religions too. They require belief in a super human order - a set of laws that exist without backing in science or human agreement. E.g. “All men are created equal”