So there was a call on Talk Heathen recently, where some lunatic theist spent a half-hour trying to justify their beliefs and, at the same time, hide from all of the credible questions that the hosts were trying to ask. I said something in the comments about this guy being an imbecile, mostly because he is.

So here’s why I think we need to stop pussyfooting around and treating these people like special snowflakes. It’s time to call a spade a spade because it’s the only way these morons are going to learn anything.

You can go and listen to the call if you’d like, it is absolutely a long call and I understand if you don’t want to. Mostly, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be yelling by the end because this theist twit is ridiculously maddening. Yet he’s really not any different than any other theist.

This is the  general theistic model. Cling desperately to the things that make you happy and reject anything else out of hand. To their credit, Forrest and Kenneth both made a lot of excellent points and Nicholas avoided every single one of them. This is a constant problem with the religious.

As many problems as I have with Matt Dillahunty at times, he’s really good at pointing this out and holding the theist’s feet to the fire, often to the point that the theist will just hang up and run away. The second anything gets too close to uncomfortable territory, they balk and run for the hills. They don’t really have another choice. It’s a defense mechanism built into just about every religion. There’s a point past which their brains shut down and their defenses come up because they’ve been taught, often from a very young age, that questioning is bad. Yet the only people who ever say that are fanatics and that’s exactly what these idiots are.

I gave up trying to coddle these morons a long time ago. I’m here to have an adult  conversation and if you can’t manage it, you deserve what you get in response. Immature children living in the bodies of adults, that doesn’t fly with me and it shouldn’t fly with you. Grow up and come on back and we’ll try again. I learned a long time ago that trying to talk through their emotional problems, that isn’t going to lead to the truth. These people aren’t interested because they’d rather have comfort than fact. The facts only get in the way.

The simple fact is, you won’t reach these people no matter what you do. No matter how nice and comforting you are, they’re never going to learn what they’re doing wrong because they don’t give a damn. You can simply refuse to address them because ultimately, it’s all a waste of time, but the fact is, these are often the people causing all of the problems in society. These are the people voting their religion into public policy. These are the people trying to restrict the rights of others. In extreme cases, these are the people shooting abortion doctors or, in other cultures, throwing gay people off of roofs or hacking up atheists with machetes. These are the problem children. We have to address them, if for no other reason than to make them look like the complete dumbasses that they are.

That’s not to say that you go after them unfairly. You just treat them as you would any other whackadoodle claim. Point out all of their problems and never allow them to rely on faith or feelings as justification for their beliefs. Faith and feelings don’t work for anything else, they shouldn’t work here either. It’s not being “mean”, it’s being realistic.

These are people who believe dumb things for bad reasons and those beliefs harm the rest of us to some degree or another. Ultimately, this is self-defense. If left unchecked, this mental problem can grow and mutate into something difficult to control. It has to be done away with and since we lack that wonderful mind-control technology that would expunge terrible, irrational and dangerous ideas from people’s heads, all we can do is show how ridiculous they are, make fun of them and let social pressure take its course.

Granted, there are a lot of people who don’t like that, mostly the religious and the politically soft-headed who lack the backbone to stand up on their own two feet and deal with the real world as it is. These people are terrified of being taken to task for the crap that they believe, it’s why they turn to violence so often.

I’m not being mean for the sake of being mean. I’m doing it because it works. I’m not telling these people they’re idiots because I want to insult them. I’m doing it because it’s the truth. The second that we get rid of the ridiculous unearned religious privilege, that’s when things will start to change. I want people not to look at these morons with sympathy, like this was something that was done to them, I want them to be looked at with scorn, like this is something they continue to perpetrate on themselves and others every single day. Adults take responsibility for their actions and their beliefs. These are not adults. They are children and therefore, they deserve to be treated that way.

Until these people get smarter, better educated, more rational and able to handle questions in a critical fashion, nothing is going to improve. We’re doing a decent job of driving them into the minority but it isn’t enough. They need to exist in such small numbers that they hold no social importance anymore. They need to be seen as a laughing stock, like the flat-earthers and the UFO nuts. Until then, they are still a danger and that danger needs to be mitigated. Talking nice and patting them on the head hasn’t done it. Maybe a few swift kicks to the noggin might help. It certainly can’t hurt.