Agree about separation of church and state.
Agree about all the others.
How about tolerance of normal, law-abiding people's belief in Gods?
If your solution is to scorn and mock and feel superior to people with different beliefs, I genuinely don't think you're much different from others who look down on people with other beliefs.
You have to remember that this is an open forum where we're free to air our views until our hearts are content. Personal experience now, but I'll take the piss out of anyone for anything at all on RAWK, much the way I would do if I was with my mates in the pub. If that's about what they think about a certain player, or about God, I don't discriminate.
Do you genuinely believe though that any atheist who has responded to you would scorn or mock their close circle of family and friends for their beliefs? I can't speak for all of them, but they all seem like an intelligent, reasoned and articulated bunch, when you remove me from the equation. In fact, I'm certain a couple of people have actually said that they've gone out of their way to not do that. I can't obviously speak for everyone, but I know that Corkboy mentioned his friends and he also mentioned, if I remember rightly, that his wife had some sort of belief system, but I can't be arsed searching for that post (apologies to Mrs C if I've got that wrong).
I'm from family of devout Catholics, who all think it's fine to keep asking me to go to Church because of their fear for my eternal damnation, yet I have never once mocked, scorned or disrespected their beliefs to them. And yet strangely, I had a grandmother who beat the shit out of me as a child for having the audacity to go to the local C of E Sunday school once because they were just the wrong type of Christians. I revel in the irony that the "good living" (which basically meant to that generation, someone who went to church regularly, including but not limited to, drunks, thieves, wife beaters and child abusers) old twat who preached so often about burning in hell fire is probably not, even though she would have been fully deserving of a seat at that particular hearth based on her own belief system. My dad isn't arsed as much but gives me that rolled eyed shrugged shoulder expression whenever I tell him that God isn't for me; my mum has that "mum" concern that I'm going to get into some sort of trouble, like when I first left home to go to University and she assumed that without her protection I'd be dead within a week from either malnutrition or I'd be run over while wearing dirty underwear, which she believed was enough to prevent the medical profession from administering life-saving treatment; and more extended family seem to revel in the fact that the burning embers of hell have got more chance of seeing me than they have of warming the toes of a paedophile priest. And yet, as much as I know that reason wouldn't work with any of these people, there is no way on earth I would mock them for their beliefs, as intolerant as those beliefs may be.
As others have alluded to, atheists are not some sort of homogenous species or sect, but based on circumstances of myself and friends, I would be willing to wager that more atheists here have had people from various religions disrespecting their decision no to have beliefs and trying to convert them to their cause than the opposite. The worst part is that the religious in these situations in my experience have always resorted to scare tactics as their last ditch argument, that of burning in hell. No respect, no tolerance, no mockery, no satire, Just outright fucking scaremongering. While it is many steps removed from the cold blooded murderers at Charlie Hebdo. the Hypercacher kosher supermarket, and the 13 kids watching football, it's still on the same fucking staircase. Mockery, scorn and even lack of respect just simply are not.
