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Even before our current "age of information" it has been a known quantity that astrology and all of these psychic games of foreknowledge, including all religion, are just wholesale invention grown on top of ignorance. It does become tough to tolerate when one sees a person over the age of 12 being tricked into believing, spending money on, and putting resources into such fraud.
When passing a 3-card monte table on the street in New York a few people will gather and watch as the scam unfolds. A couple will participate. Eventually someone calls the cops. This person who calls the cops doesn't do it because they can't "tolerate a card game." They understand it is a con and doing something to help prevent idiots from losing money, and maybe to help stop a little bit of danger in the world.
When you're 8, Bigfoot is intriguing, Loch Ness Monster is a possibility and maybe you wonder if you might find an actual Genie in a bottle. Once you grow up, if you still believe in reading chicken entrails, or that a magical undead sky wizard created you, other folks may not be as tolerant of it for the same reasons as the street monte game. Ignorance and zealotry for "mysterious forces" are detrimental to the progression of mankind.
http://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfkIt's one thing to sit in here and tolerate speculation on the mysterious forces affecting the price of bitcoin -- we signed up for that when we entered the Speculation area, more specifically this Wall Tracker thread. It's another to have to tolerate ignorant religious propaganda and/or endless fraudulent psychic promotion. Please start your own "I Don't Understand Everything About The Universe Yet Therefore Gawd Musta Dun It Tracker" thread or "Mysterious Psychic Stuff That 'Man May Never Fully Understand,' So It Must Be Magically Real" thread.
You are proselytizing, not unlike the people you despise so much.
There is a simple test for what you should, no, must tolerate: does it cause quantifiable harm to you or others? If yes, the demand for tolerance doesn't apply. If not, tolerate it.
I already anticipate your answer:
But why yes, oda, of course religion causes substantial harm to humanity, and has been doing so for ages!.
The answer to that claim is of course: no, it does not, or at least not universally.
If you would live in, say, Afghanistan and you were a woman being deprived of basic rights, based on religious grounds, you can chose to fight your fight against religions.
If it were your goal to change the above situation in Afghanistan, as an outsider, you would be justified to do so.
But since you most likely live in the kind of circumstances that most of us do ("Western" society, in practice mostly secular, with some vestiges of religious morals still in place), you have no right to be intolerant of those who practice religion, or any other kind of non-empirical belief system, within the bounds of that society. The harm you perceive is too immaterial for you to
inflict the amount of harm you do when you chose not to tolerate their beliefs and practices.
Please note that the above does not infringe on your right of freedom of expression: you are very much free to argue (publically) that, for the betterment of the human kind, the influence of religion should decrease even further. But the underlying stance in that discussion has to be that of tolerating the opposing side's views and practices -- something that is very clearly not the case when you (not you, personally) write that religious people would ideally be deported to an island.
