You know, I'm fine with other having differing opinions.
I prefer the well reasoned, fact based ones, delivered without condescension, belittlement or arrogance or personal insults. They can be very interesting in the back and forth exploring the position / opinion is a friendly way. From all experiences, there's a shortage of posts that manage to combine all those.
Well, there is your own bias. You are forwarding the very false notion that you can have a reasoned exchange about something a person imagines inside their head with ZERO standard of evidence. Sam Harris said it best, religion is a conversation stopper, and you can see what all of the phony, religious "scholarship" in the middle east has gotten us. Nothing but centuries of war, exploitation and bloodshed.
As far as Behar is concerned, what would you call likening someone's religion to a mental illness? Friendly? Fair? Honest? Tolerant?
Accurate? Who is tolerant of mental illness? Why should I indulge the fantasies of others just to be called "tolerant"? Are the religious tolerant of each other? No. That's a ridiculous thing to be upset about. Respect, especially intellectually, is earned.
Frankly it's not any of these things, and it's bigoted, condescending and insulting.
Wrong. It's bigoted when one faith disagrees with another simply because they are different. She wasn't offering her own fantasy as the alternative "truth", she was speaking the fact that when people hear voices, that can be a warning sign of delusion. Having no evidence of a god but plenty of evidence concerning schizophrenia, the "condescension" is warranted.
Now, you can take the position that Christians deserve to be, and should be, treated condescendingly and insulted, but then, how tolerant would that be?
Not very, but isn't liberal tolerance something that is constantly being complained about by the right? Certainly, though, you see the difference between being tolerant of innate qualities, like skin color, and being tolerant of
choices, like faith. Can't you? Does that distinction need to be explained again and again before the right will admit that ideas, even religious ones, are not, and shouldn't be, protected against criticism.
There are hundreds or thousands of different faiths, sects and spiritual opinions. All that tells me is that it's a popular human activity to participate in these various exercises of self-placation. In such a variable rich environment for any person to call their opinion truth, as the Christians do, is to make truth nothing more than a whim or a political change instituted at the point of a sword or the pull of a ballot switch.
I'm not tolerant of many faiths because they aren't tolerant of the facts we live by. I say **** those martyrs who think their god is more important than my lack of one. They are proud robots not moral beings.