prog: (norton)
prog ([personal profile] prog) wrote2009-01-20 12:53 pm

To quote a friend's .sig file

"Good job everybody."

Also:

• Is this the first time a sitting U.S. president gave a shout-out to nonreligious Americans in a major speech? (He used the word 'non-believers', which I also approve of.)

• I was glad that there didn't seem to be much chanting after his speech. The time for that stuff is done; now is the time to get to work.

[identity profile] radtea.livejournal.com 2009-01-20 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)

I believe people mostly see in others what they find in themselves, and on that basis I'd say any religious person who is threatened by "humanist" isn't responding to an innocent suffix, but to their own dreams of ideological conquest.

I am not about to change my language to make nice with such people, because they are my enemies, pure and simple, and I AM out to change their beliefs, at least to the extent of getting them to accept my right to believe in what I believe in just as I accept theirs.

[identity profile] ahkond.livejournal.com 2009-01-20 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)
And I'm not about to change my language to antagonize people who are not my enemies, but are merely deluded, for the sake of the semantics of words that demonstrably mean different things to different people.

I wasn't talking about not wanting to change people's beliefs in human rights; I was talking about not wanting to dissuade people about the existence of deities.