Has General Discussion Been Hostile to Religious Believers recently?

[Prophet 451]

289. I don't think anyone's saying it's hate speech

All that's being said is that the sheer amount of bashing is tiresome and makes some of us, as people of faith, feel unwelcome here. Criticism is one thing but when some atheists resort to "delusional", "mentally ill", comparisons with Santa/fairies, etc, that's not criticism. There's no attempt to engage with us or our beliefs as criticism would require, to understand us or where we're coming from, they're just reduced to the childish pablum of literalism to be ridiculed as stupid and dismissed.

I keep using this analogy: If I was in love, even if you hated my lover, you'd respect the strength of feeling involved. Some of the atheists here refuse to even grant our core beliefs that much respect. About a week ago, there was a thread about some horrible thing and I posted "Jesus..." as the subject line and the candle-holding smiley as the text. That's it, that's all. I used the word "Jesus" as an exclamation and posted a gesture of sympathy. Someone felt so strongly at just the mere mention of the word that they felt they had to respond to say there was no Jesus. In fact, we had a guy post in the religion group a couple of days ago simply to say that he respects us but has no respect for our faith. Nothing else, just that. He felt so strongly that he went to the religion group and created a thread just to say he didn't respect our faith. That's not criticism. That's just attacking believers because you feel superior to them.

I don't think any of us are asking for rules to be made or for anyone's speech to be censored. Some of us would just like to say that we're uncomfortable here because of the constant bashing of religion here (and it is constant, there's always far more anti-religion threads in the religion group than there are for the religious and usually several in GD) and some of us are starting to ask ourselves if it's worth the effort coming here when we have to either sit quietly and put up with the constant needling or turn off what is a fairly important part of our psyche.