What's toxic about this? Two perfectly sensible points of view and you think Mr. X is dangerous to be around?
Not sure where the word "dangerous" comes from.
Just to explain things. If you tell people at work that it's stupid to believe in god, you are probably going to get fired, and rightly so. It's not dangerous, but it is toxic (belittling people for their religious beliefs).
It's like how when I "execute" a program, you understand that I am not killing the program as punishment. Even though the word "execute" has that meaning, it only applies in other contexts.
When we apply "toxic" to a person or his behaviour, we borrow that seriousness. That's why we choose that specific, strong words with a well-known meaning.
I oppose calling "I disagree with your world view" toxic. A serial killer might deserve the term.
what makes you think so?
words means in theirs contextes whatever people attributed to them, and I've never seen toxic used in other context than somebody trashtalking somebody and being called toxic, so definitely not dangerous.
Because that's how language works. You don't call somebody a neanderthal to imply he has great hair.
Exactly, language changes dynamically
People years ago started using "toxic" to describe people who are negatively affecting them - e.g in games via trashtalk.
So, you knew what the meaning of "toxic" was all along, but you pretended to not know what the meaning was in order to make some kind of point? I would prefer a direct discussion.
> I oppose calling "I disagree with your world view" toxic. A serial killer might deserve the term.
Mr. X isn't toxic for his world view, it's his actions--his actions are to call people stupid over their religious beliefs.
Stallman isn't "toxic" for writing a couple essays or emails, but you could argue that he's toxic for the way he treated people over the past decades.
Yes, I knew all along that "toxic" means "dangerous". When we're not talking about eg. plutonium, we at least borrow the seriousness of that use. It's a very strong word.
> [...] his actions are to call people stupid over their religious beliefs.
I think it's a stretch to call speaking an action. Hitting religious people would be an action, calling them out really isn't.
Stallman is apparently not the most agreeable person, and possibly he's been nasty and hostile. Some people have chosen not to work with him, others have worked a lot with him. He's not killed anybody, he's not made of plutonium, there's no danger.
For this reason, verbally harassing people for their faith is IMO more toxic than "I disagree with you" or even "I disagree with you and I think you're stupid".
Pointing out that all available research points to some religious claim being wrong is not harassment.
According to US federal laws, religion is a protected class just like gender. You can’t discriminate people based on that, no matter whether you related to government or not.
As an employer or anyone at all really, ideally, you should do the right things, where “the right things” is only vaguely defined.
Some of these things are written in laws, regulations, and court decisions. They help when one doesn’t know how to handle certain citations (like this case about religious beliefs of other people): looking for that stuff and simply doing what’s written there is a good strategy to not screw up human interactions too much.
However, many other of these right things aren’t written anywhere, adult people are supposed to already know them somehow. Probably, that’s what called “cultural context”.
All that stuff is weird and often illogical, but that’s how all modern societies have been working for centuries if not millennia.
That's "toxic" because now you have a staff member who people won't communicate effectively with.
There are different ways to stand by one's beliefs. One is to keep them to yourself and let them guide your decisions silently, but defend them vigorously if they are actively challenged. And one is to feel the need to rub them into everyone's face constantly, because there is only Right and Wrong and you can't deal with somebody being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you) without feeling personally attacked and going on the offensive.
In this scenario, our guy wouldn't accept that others might believe differently, because he'd never know, because they never say. Fine by me.
> being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you)
That's not what wrong means. Opinions are personal and subjective and can't be wrong or right. Religious ideas a not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.
But after thinking about it for a bit, this approach of "tread carefully and don't disturb others" is still problematic. Because, where do you draw the line about things that you should or should not speak up against? My intuitive example would have been an anti-vaxxer at work, that I probably would have felt the need to criticize and correct, because their opinion might kill my grandma. But then, militant atheists might also feel like they have to criticize believers, given the huge number of people killed in the name of one god or another.
I think a fundamental factor here is the level of confidence in one's belief that is warranted. Challenging others (especially publicly) on what they believe should only be seen as a sensible thing to do when the confidence in your opinion that leads to to that criticism is warranted. For things like vaccinations, we thankfully have scientific evidence that would indicate that anyone who outright believes they are ineffectual or "give people autism" is, in all likelihood, simply wrong. On the other hand, a belief in god ultimately can't ever be shown as wrong[2], so being very confident in your belief that there is no god still doesn't justify putting down others for believing the opposite.
> That's not what wrong means.
Yes sorry, that was meant fairly tongue-in-cheek, because I assumed that for a person like our Mr. X, the distinction between "of a different opinion" and "wrong" would be very blurry.
> Religious ideas are not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.
Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
2: Unless we talk about ridiculous stuff like creationism, which would at least be very hard to defend if you simultaneously want to use the scientific method for anything.
There are no militant atheists, in any reasonable sense of the word. If mentioning facts about the world is seen as criticism of religious people, that's a big problem. We know vaccines work, because our best research shows that. It's not controversial and we should be free to mention it. Huge parts of many religious text are factually incorrect, we know that from enormous amounts of research -- this is also not controversial and we should be free to talk about it.
> Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?
In that case everything is opinion and we have no real knowledge of anything.
Thanks!
If you read the book it’s clear communism, fascism, democracy and capitalism are really religions too. They require belief in a super human order - a set of laws that exist without backing in science or human agreement. E.g. “All men are created equal”
I don't agree with that interpretation, someone who champions democracy just has a set of moral values they want to apply, they don't think the universe is inherently democratic or anything like that.
Likewise for your other examples. They're ideologies, not religions.