This is how the Daily Kos folks say Happy Easter: a diarist with the byline "maf1029" absolutely, positively refuses to grant any respect to anyone holding those foolish religious beliefs. The headline was "I will NOT respect your beliefs...." He's a cradle Catholic who escaped the church with 'the icky wood carvings of torture and a 25 foot tall hanging statue of a bleeded and brutalized person nailed to two planks of wood."
“I do not respect the beliefs of others WRT [with regard to] religion/spirituality. It is a conscious and willful choice not to. It is deliberate," he wrote. "It is my choice, just as it was my choice to dump religion and to clear my mind and my life from the superimposed guilt, fear, more guilt, self-loathing, bigotry, and the silly forced eating of seafood on Fridays.”
He doesn't want religion imposed on him -- even as he waves his flag of unbelief:
Respect as a noun is defined as "high or special regard." As a verb, it means "to consider worthy of high regard."
So, why would I, who have worked my intellectual ass off to get away from the constraints, confinement, and constrictions of religion, even want to consider any of it with high regard? And yet, that is what some theists demand -- respect for their beliefs.
Not gonna happen.
Now, let's imagine for a second that I could willingly and willfully respect a theistic belief system without vomiting. Of course, I would need to be lobotomized first and then would be able to hold that belief system in high regard. But why would I want to? I've worked hard on myself to escape all of that voodoo, including the ecclesiastical coercion and spiritual/emotional blackmail. And now I'm supposed to respect that? That's an insane idea, and it's not gonna happen.
This is how Maf elaborated on his unhappy religious childhood:
I was a cradle Catholic -- born into it, forced baptized as an infant, coerced into First Communion, talked into Confirmation, and all the while shamed for being gay and not marrying. I'm not sure about First Confession, though. I was sick with chicken pox in the time leading up to the training/indoctrination for that stupid ritual, so I didn't know what to do. On the day of 1st Confession, I went with the class after school to the main voodoo chamber chamber of the cult house (replete with icky wood carvings of torture and a 25 foot tall hanging statue of a bleeding and brutalized person nailed to two planks of wood) and waited my turn. Then I was escorted into a dark closet, where I stood in a corner. I heard a disembodied voice say, "Well, say something. I don't have all day." I was 7. I cried and said, "I don't know what to do! I don't know what to do!" I ran out of the dark closet and didn't stop until I got home, where I locked myself in the bathroom and threw up. After that, I was grounded for a month for "misbehaving." And I never set foot in a confessional ever again.
Now, that's all fascinating, I'm sure, but the point is -- that event helped shaped my notion of organized religion and spirituality, for better or for worse. And that is how I view organized religion -- a darkened closet into which people are thrown and forced/coerced into "confessing" how sh---y of a person one is and begging for forgiveness for being [a] sh---y person.
If this story actually happened -- an unsympathetic priest telling him time's a wasting, parents who saw a traumatized kid and grounded him for a month -- that's no way to pass along your faith tradition. But the tone of this piece brings about the same measure of compassion to the table. It's no way for someone to persuade another that atheism is the true path to happiness. Bitterness seems to be what's being served on this plate.
