DonBradley wrote:Hi EA,
My response to you expressing disgust that I'm grateful for being re-embraced was meant only to suggest that this wasn't one of them. To my mind, it has genuine disvalue.
What I was expressing disgust with is the tendency of certain people to treat apostates and critics poorly and the faithful well simply on the basis of that fact alone. That includes whether they'll consider you a friend, whether they'll read your arguments charitably, whether they will bite their tongue on criticizing you, etc. That this would happen in your case is entirely unsurprising to me and would be no different if you were a JW. I do not modify my behavior this way based on whether someone is an atheist. That would be utterly foreign to me. I find this behavior wrong and evocative of a cultish mentality. I think it creepy. That the warm embrace you received involved this and you seemed pleased by it was offputting to me, but I did not say it disgusted me. One of the common aspects of high maintenance faiths is the tendency to have intense ingroup loyalty/comradere and to treat outsiders well only insofar as they are seen as potential converts that are not a threat to the faith. I do not think you are like this, but we seem to greatly differ on how to comment on this behavior in others.
Perhaps the problem is that you don't understand that I'm not being disgusted by being reembraced or forgiven, but by you being treated well only as a condition of your continued loyalty to the faith. That you say DCP
wasn't like this means something to me, but based on what I saw online, that certainly isn't true of everyone who reembraced you. Make no mistake, if you apostasize again and are openly critical of the LDS faith, you're going back to the shark tank. I view that kind of friendship as hollow.
What are your current areas of inquiry in philosophy?
Well, I continue to keep up on phil of religion and metaethics as those have always been my prime interests. Lately I've been trying to get up to snuff on idealism.
