I see the likes of Big Bruv and Pauleastbay regularly spewing hate filled rants against Lucia, generally accusing her of things based on their negative interpetations of her comments, rather than wondering, for even a moment, if they have applied their own absolutist interpetations to her comments. This then has them arguing against the strawman of their own preconceived opinions, but using Lucia as the punching bag to justify their disgusting comments [which I wont repreoduce here]You can see Pauleastbay's own assumptions here creating a problem for himself:
What pisses me about the likes of Lucia, is my parents are really decent people and they would be if they were muslims or atheists or Buddhists, this isn’t something I can claim for myself but my point is religion does not make you a decent human being, in fact it acts in the opposite way for many.What Pauleastbay assumes here is that Lucia has supposedly maintained that one can only be good if they are Christian. That is a misunderstanding of what she has said in the past.
Big Bruv, in the same thread, goes off the rails very quickly. Lucia is talking about the Christian context our culture has developed from, and makes an assumption that many people today, even if atheists, could well have been baptised Christian, and the thread fills up with disbelief and a quick decision by Big Bruv that she lies.
Given that most of the people I know were baptised (born in the early 60′s, I think it was more of a cultural than religious thing) I am interested in finding out what that means for me in the eyes of a sky fairy follower.Of course, he frames the argument to be slightly different than what Lucia discussed, but nevertheless, it still doesn't warrant calling her a liar. Lucia takes the time to borrow from the Statistics NZ Census information:
Now that I think about it, in my wide circle of friends (it comes from being incredibly popular) there is not one child that I know of who has been baptised.
Guess that proves Lucia’s assertion that 50% of the public are sky fairy followers to be another one of her Catholic lies.
In the 2006 Census, just over 2 million people, or 55.6 percent of those answering the religious affiliation question, affiliated with a Christian religion (including Māori Christian).But the larger problem is a lot of atheists today refuse to accept the huge influence our Christian heritage has had on shaping our culture. In this sense, Chritianity is more than just a religion. It is cultural, so even Big Bruv suggesting, at the beginning of his comment, that people were only baptised as a cultural thing, proves Lucia's point correct, without even needing to resort to the census.
Whilst Big Bruv and Pauleastbay want to consider Chrisitianity only as a religion, and thus, right from the beginning, misunderstand many of Lucia's comments, Lucia speaks as much on our cultural context, which is seeped in Christianity.
Christianity, to the horror of the anti-religious bigots has been a vital part of our history and the morals our society is founded upon. Such morality is far more encompassing and pervasive than the narrow selective definitions cherry picked from puritanism, for example. A scary thought worth denying by many anti-Christian bigots so as not to confuse their world view.
Even if this society becomes an atheistic one in the next 200 years, they will all be atheists that sprung from Christianity, and the mark of this Chritian heritage is indelibly stamped on every modernist rationalist's forehead as if they had been baptised.