The Lounge: Official Spamzone Community Thread

Someone at work told me that she'll pray for me after I told her I was Atheist.
So I told her I'll write her a letter to Santa.

 

It' s one of those things that has yet to happen to me but must be Tuesday for you.
Not sure how I' d react, if it happened irl I' d probably be too busy being bemused.

 

Someone left a bunch of 1,000,000 "dollar bills" at the table, but they were just tract. To quote the back, "What's the real one million dollar question? Would you go to Heaven when you die?" and I was talking about getting a similar check at my old job and it annoyed me not because I'm an Atheist, but people who leave that crap in restaurants are horrible. Employees are literally made to be as personable and friendly as possible in the customer service industry and most of them -in my experience- won't speak about how uncomfortable they are with that conversation. It's just not the place for it.

Funny part was, the employee who told me that was the only one dressed up at work. She was a cow. She's dressed up as the sacred cattle of some religions while celebrating a Pagan holiday.

 

There are good and bad people in any group. Religion, belief, whatever you want to call it. The fact that we feel the need to separate and group people together is rather annoying. I don't care if you are a christian, atheist, or believe in the great flying spaghetti monster. As long as you aren't an *******, you are fine with me.

I don't really think shoving one's religion down someone else's throat by leaving a fake tip suggesting they go to church or something is appropriate, however I also don't think that insensitive bullshit should be matched by other insensitive bullshit. More often than not when you see discussion of extreme cases of religion "sharing" it ends up being a circle jerk of "I don't like how people do x."

I believe there are good and bad people in any group, which is all the more reason not to group them up in the first place.


/rant by a religious guy who swears but also likes it when people just get along

 

Eh. If someone is insensitive about someone else's belief, then I think they deserve the same treatment especially when it's someone coming from a religious standpoint. Do to others as you want them to do to you; so insensitivity towards ones belief will be rewarded towards insensitivity towards your own. It's a vicious circle, true, but I'm not turning the other cheek. Telling an Atheist you'll pray for them is horribly offensive if you know they're Atheist. I don't respond to someone who I find out is Christian with "God's not real," but if they respond to my lack of religion by immediately countering it, then they initiated that discussion. I don't have such a thin skin that it bothers me or ruins my day or anything and I love debating the existence of any deity or explaining my disdain for religion, but I won't do it just because someone brings up their own belief on the matter. I don't care about a confirmation of your beliefs, I care about a disregard of others (assuming that you aren't trying to start a discussion, but even then, there's certain platforms for it like my Facebook) and inconsistency. Just to belabor the point one more time: I'll gladly criticize any rule of thought if I can poke holes in it, but I won't do it directly to someone who follows that rule of thought unless they ask for it.

I understand the "live and let live" line, but I extremely disagree with it when it affects others negatively. Is fighting fire with fire effective? Probably not, but "ignoring it" out of "respect" is a disservice to the victims.

On a related note, a commercial about Leah Remini's dispute with the Church of Scientology just came on while I was typing this lol[DOUBLEPOST=1446347147][/DOUBLEPOST]My Creative Writing professor ended her email with "all the best chariots."
Is that a thing?

 

The whole "do onto others as you would have them do onto you" is a great tool for teaching 8 year olds in Sunday school....However, ask any religious person that actually has some mental capacity (and this is coming from someone who is actually brain damaged) that "golden rule" falls apart very easily.

This is the way I see it. Am I going to treat people with respect and kindness by default? Yes for the most part I am going to TRY (key word TRY, I am not perfect, nor is anyone else) to do that. Nothing really comes from fighting fire with fire, unless you are just frustrated with the person and feel like taking your emotions out on them. Then, by treating them like your personal punching bag, you get something very useful out of it. However, this isn't exactly the nicest thing to do. I am not saying you are a terrible person by being angry at those who are ridiculous with their religions. I am however saying that there is a much less stressful way to handle stuff like that. If you need to vent, that is fine. However spitting fire for the sake of spitting fire is just needless conflict. But hey, if you like that sort of thing, more power to you I guess (just keep that shit away from me lol).

I disagree. You may personally find that offensive, but the way I see it, someone who doesn't believe in god being prayed for is a harmless gesture.

If you believe in god - cool someone is praying for you. yay
If you don't - cool, they care enough to dedicate their time DURING something they care deeply about

Don't get me wrong. If someone says "I'll pray for you because you don't believe what I believe, therefore you are wrong/evil". That is dumb, that is just flat out dumb. However, someone just praying for you because they are concerned (perhaps someone you love is in the hospital, or you just got fired, or you have some big test), then that at least shows that they care enough to be concerned for you.

If someone gets in your face and outright disrespects you, then by all means be offended/do whatever makes you feel better. I am not the kind of christian who is against flu shots, certain types of music, insert whatever ridiculous made up rule here. Hell (see what I did there, I swore, break out da holy water) I don't pay attention to a lot of rules and even left my church because the adults who participated in that particular church were awful people. I just try to be a good person/good example of what a caring/nice person should be. To me that is more than what these "devout Christians" at the church I attended do.

To give you a personal example, tl;dr my mom broke her back twice and had to get a spinal fusion (twice, might not wanna look it up, its not pretty). So she is pretty much is doomed to be in pain forever, and it will most likely never be fixed. So every Sunday people would ask her how she is. Me being the person I am, I tended to pay close attention to how they reacted. Turns out they were very disappointing whenever she was FEELING WELL, because they thought there was no reason to pray for her if she wasn't in pain. That is unbelievably ****ed up and any christian who falls under that category of "crazy" in my eyes, doesn't deserve your respect. Just try to keep in mind that there are less crazy religious people out there.



Hope some of that made sense / sorry for the rambling

 

We get those religious pamphlets at work a lot tucked in front of the magazines at the registers. Mostly because we sell Cosmopolitan magazine. And the pamphlets are usually located in front of this particular magazine. Though this past week, there was at least one in front of every magazine that had something to do with Halloween. We have no idea who is leaving them.

It is a mystery.

But they all end up in the garbage.

 

I' ve seen a caller on The Atheist Experience acknowledge how dickish a rule it is to send people to hell simply for refusing to believe in God without a shred of evidence. Then shrug it away by saying they' re not the one who wrote the rules. While these people might be too far down the rabbit hole to realize demonizing the doubters is the very first thing any con man will do, the show runner simply brought up St Thomas. Why did Jesus choose to indulge him when he asked for proof ? Poor guy couldn' t compute anymore.

 

It makes sense. I just disagree with how you see it. Not saying one way is right or wrong, but it isn't stressful for me at all to respond the way I do. It's more stressful for me to "let it go." It goes back to the Donald Trump conversation on the last page (page before?); hating him doesn't take any energy for me, but not reacting to his comments would be a lot worse. I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Personally, I love learning about religion and how different people have a relationship with it from a standard-of-life point of view. I hate hearing about religion and how people outside of it are supposed to act within its rules (here's looking at you, future in-laws [I hope they don't see this]). One of my favorite conversations was when I met a former (allegedly) girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix's bass player at work. I don't think it was the right avenue to have the conversation by far, but she told me about how Jesus saved her from drugs and a bad life in general and that stuff and she praises him everyday. That's awesome. That's her relationship with Jesus. That I actually like hearing about. At no point in her conversation did she address me having a relationship with Jesus or anything. Like I said earlier, I don't care about a confirmation of someone's belief -I can respect that- it's a direct and unwarranted rebuttal of someone else's belief that gets under my skin.


Personally, as an Atheist (I'm not going to speak for all, but this is true at least for the ones that I know), saying you'll pray for a nonbeliever is offensive. Praying for them itself? No, that's perfectly fine. I don't see the need -if you know they're a nonbeliever or a follower of a different belief- for the praying person to tell the nonbeliever they'll pray for them. If it makes you feel better, then do it privately (like Jesus said); there's no need to announce that intent without challenging that belief. A friend of mine who is a very out-spoken Atheist recently had a death in his immediate family. I don't know how his personal life was, but at least on Facebook his page was flooded "praying for you" comments. Now, I'm sure some of those people didn't know he was an Atheist (not sure how as out-spoken as he is about it; if they knew about the death, I figured they'd know about that, but whatever), but judging from his reaction, a lot of them knew. Outright telling him that they were praying for him while he was in mourning did more harm than good; it's a challenge of his beliefs at a very inappropriate time. I get it: praying for him makes them feel better, like they're helping without actually having done anything but there's no need to tell us that. And of course, he blew up over it and most of them instead defending their choice of praying for him, which could only make him feel worse. Someone even pointed out that his mom had asked for prayers. Again, that's fine. Let her know you're praying for them but there is absolutely no need to go out of the way you tell him you're praying for him and then defending the act after being confronted about it. My grandmother doesn't know I'm an Atheist (and she better never find out) so when she tells me she's praying for me and all that jazz and god bless me, it doesn't bother me. My mother, on the other hand, knows and still does it daily while telling me that I'm not allowed to talk to my little sister about being an Atheist because "she needs morals" (strangely enough, she acknowledged that I'm a moral person with good principles. Don't know where she thinks I got it from).

I know there are less crazy religious people (I'm marrying one of them<3). I know there are crazy nonreligious people. But I wasn't talking about all of any group. Sorry if I accidentally made that generalization. Though it may be because I'm surrounded by religion, but what I speak of is a trend I see throughout the Christian base, even the well-intentioned ones. A lot of them are very open-minded, they just don't know better; like people who use offensive language without realizing it's offensive (on another minority note, my girlfriend's father recently said that I'd fit in when we went to eat at Mexican restaurant knowing full well that I'm Dominican and look more like him than I did our waiter. He wasn't trying to be racist, but it was racist nonetheless).[DOUBLEPOST=1446349097][/DOUBLEPOST]

This is completely unrelated to the current conversation, but on a similar note, someone left a business card for their catering company on our bulletin board for customers. We're a restaurant that relies heavily on catering. It did not go over well with my manager.

 

I've been up since 5:00 AM. Rather than go straight on my computer, I used that time to clean my computer and desk. :)

 

Some kids rang my bell yesterday and I had no candy for them. Bought me an "ugh" chorus xD. I keep forgetting Halloween is now a thing in my country (it popped up out of nowhere around the year 2000 and still isn' t anywhere as big as in the US). They weren' t butt-hurt about it though, they just said try to remember it next year and have a nice evening.

 

guess who lucked the hell out at a Best Buy??

Spoiler: it was me

i've had Ike since August but somehow the store had a couple Dark Pits and like TWENTY Little Macs and i feel truly blessed today

 

to be fair, finding the ones you want is usually gonna be a struggle just because of the lack of supply for characters that aren't Mario, Link or Peach. and given the way scalpers are making you pay extra when you buy online no matter what, it's not exactly easy to commit to buying them in general.

all i can tell you is that if you find one you like at a store by pure luck, you should get it. even if the website says it's not in stock (like it did for me with Dark Pit today), and you're going there anyway, just take a second and check what's actually on the shelves

 

Seconded. Amiibo hunting is hard, but I have a feeling that all these restocks and exclusives no longer being exclusive, will help things immensely. I remember when Villager was super expensive and now he's at least in a considerable price range.

In the end, it might be a gamble. Meta Knight nor Samus have been restocked. Same goes for Kirby. And then there's the Lucina and Robin...I had to wake up super early just to get those two.

 

COMPLETELY UNRELATED but Apple missed an opportunity.

On a similarly unreleated note, I read too much tvtropes.

 

I don't think I'll ever get into the Amiibo craze. If I'm getting a figure, it's gonna be a lot more detailed than the ones Nintendo are selling with such poor supply.