How many times have you run into this one? You’ll be talking to a theist and they will tell you exactly what you think. They don’t ask, they tell. They explain that they know you better than you know yourself. Why? Because they can’t face a world where everyone isn’t fundamentally exactly the same as they are.
So let’s talk about it.
I ran into this twice this week so far and it’s only Wednesday. In two separate discussions, I had a theist tell me that I believed that gods didn’t exist because that’s what atheists were. All of my disagreement on the matter didn’t make a difference, if I said otherwise, I wasn’t an atheist and if I insisted that I was, I must believe that no gods could possibly exist anywhere.
That one is really common and, I think, the reason we see it so often is because the religious are really good at projection. Their entire faith is based on blind belief and going along with the crowd and if someone tells them that’s what atheists are and it appeals to them on an emotional level, then that’s what atheists must be and no one can tell them otherwise.
Yet as frustrating as that one is, and we see it all the time, this second example is worse. I had commented on a Rationality Rules video where I said:
Of course, he had originally made a claim that my saying that theists just ran away, that was somehow part of my worldview or some such nonsense. I responded by asking him to demonstrate that I had a worldview at all and that was part of his response. If you want to go look at it in context, the video I was responding to is here.
This is probably one of the dumbest things that I have seen a theist say in recent memory. Whatever would we do if it weren’t for them telling us what we actually think?
Yet we see it all of the time, right? It’s because their religious faith has poisoned their ability to think critically, or often at all. They’re right because they want to be right, whether they’re actually right or not. It’s why trying to have these discussions just makes them look stupid, which is what I said initially. They don’t tend to like getting exposed like that so… they go running right back to theological mama. It’s comforting to think that you automatically know it all, even when you demonstrably do not. They are so self-assured that everything they believe is so that they can’t accept reality when it turns out that they’re wrong.
This is just a single example, of which there are many.
So the question really is, what do we do about it? Because the second I decided that this person was either a troll or too stupid to be bothered with, they turned it around like I was trying to run away. I’d made my point. He didn’t like it but that doesn’t change my point. There are a lot of theists out there whose height of intellectual capacity is “I know you are but what am I?” They’re having a conversation with themselves in their own head. We’re only tangentially involved. They’re too busy trying to tell us what we really think and the fact that they’re mistaken, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Here’s the reality for you people though. It is literally impossible for you to know more about what I think than I do. It simply can’t be done. Yet whereas atheists tend to ask “what do you believe and why?” they’re too busy trying “here’s what you believe and here’s why you believe it!”
Yeah, not so much! It’s why most of these discussions go absolutely nowhere. They’re too busy talking to themselves to bother talking to us. They’re too busy with their blind faith to ever have time for demonstrable facts. Conversations go back and forth and theirs only go one way. It’s why I spend so much time rolling my eyes at the religious.
They’re just too stupid to be bothered with.
Re: the religious are really good at projection.✔ Their entire faith is based on blind belief and going along with the crowd and if someone tells them that’s what atheists are and it appeals to them on an emotional level, then that’s what atheists must be and no one can tell them otherwise.✔
So often that personalized God is a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears, and desires. I know it was for me. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: It means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacrificed at the expense of the female and can lead to neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacent within them; “he” can make us cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. And “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn, and marginalize.
So often when someone is accusing you of being/thinking something, you are a mirror in which they are seeing their own reflection. -They are not seeing you. They are not seeing me.
Which is why I, and others, have noted that the religious find it impossible to imagine that everyone isn’t just like them, because their entire religious beliefs are an emotional personification of reality. They don’t care what we think because we don’t really matter. We’re just, as you say, a mirror for them to see themselves in. Kind of pathetic, that.