Is Faith a Cognitive Error?

[Major Nikon]

46. I cut and pasted from your post

I do not challenge those that choose to believe there is no God, that is their personal choice and should be respected.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1218&pid=305671

The only edit I made was the addition of quotes around what I cut and pasted from your post. I'm not sure how I could have misquoted you.

At any rate regardless of how you define atheism, it is no more than an idea and like all ideas it's entirely possible to disrespect the idea without disrespecting those who may subscribe to that idea. That's a very important concept to understand if you want to hang around here because you'll see lots of disrespect towards various ideas. I understand many religionists have a serious investment in many of their ideas, but at the end of the day they are still nothing more than ideas. So if you take personal disrespect from an instance where someone merely disrespected an idea you happen to like, you might want to consider if it's because maybe you aren't as sure of that idea as you might wish. If you believed in it strongly enough, criticism of it shouldn't affect you.

Comparing atheism to religion is by no means nothing more than a binary choice. As you said, atheism is a lack of belief in gods. Some atheists go one step further and believe there are no gods. Even in the 2nd instance that's the extent of atheism. OTOH, religion isn't just the belief that one or more gods exist. It incorporates various mythologies, philosophies, moralities, dogma, and doctrines to varying degrees. That's a lot of ideas you are asking others to respect and in return you can only offer respect of a very basic idea that I'm pretty sure most atheists wouldn't care if you respected or didn't.

The bottom line is if you want to believe one or more deities exist, I can certainly respect that much and I won't say you are wrong. The problem is religion brings a shitton more baggage with it and asking anyone to respect all of it is a bit too much, IMO. There's a lot of things people file away as intolerance that has exactly shit to do with tolerance.