| 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. |
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!