You do not know what my expectations are. I do not know what my expectations are. I have had plenty of experiences already across a variety of friendly vs hostile encounters. But I do not know where on the different spectrums this particular place will be. I am cautiously preparing for the worst of them but have less clarity on what to expect of them.
That is the plan. Nothing said by anyone in this thread has been a good enough reason to either not attend at all or attend but do something differently than what I already had planned.
So, a bit of background so you understand my language because you just spoke past me.
Here, "tempering your expectations" is to take those unfixed expectations that are intentionally out of focus, and to "predict" of them "the most likely set", and to have that set mostly center on "keeping one's head down".
I had a hard enough time as an intelligent rational thinker when I was one of them, and my thoughts while rational were initiated from a very fucked up starting point.
I asked certain kinds of questions, made certain kinds of statements that poked the occasional hole, and I found myself promptly managed
as a Christian.
If you want to know what to expect from them, you just got a thread of it: a bunch of fundamentalist
christians who all think that just because they
have an old book with a lot of answers (and a couple smoking dog turds in the brownie mix) figured out that there are zero observable or logically implied gods, that they are smarter than everybody else.
I have a list inside my head of people here who never once have admitted they were wrong in all the years before I started to put folks on my ignore list and enjoy when others curate their stupid for me.
This place you are going to is filled with folks just like that. That is what to expect. Expect people who have spent their youths trying their very best to feel like the guy or girl who is always right.
I was there.
That was the reason I was there.
In all honesty it's too hard for me to say I'm wrong sometimes, but I feel like looking at myself and trying to recognize the wrong parts is important so I try hard to do that.
These people haven't, and most likely won't ever experience that level of personal growth and I have mixed feelings about a number of atheists as well, and some of those mixed feelings
are about you.
I unlike others won't say that I am not a troll. I'm absolutely a troll. I love trolling.
I just try to not do it because it's not nice, though occasionally I vent on folks who aim their hate cannons with an intent to splash, or for those who seek the power to forgive themselves of anything.
Some of the folks, most of them even who are being shitty to you right now, though,
they are not trolls.
They are absolutely being shitty right now, but they are not trolls.... they just don't really entirely know what they are talking about.
Some of those hate cannon folks will be there too, though: those who wish justification for spewing ire.
And there will be a lot of them. These are the folks who want to convince people that there aren't errors because they want to point at things that I would argue are steaming dog turds*. There was a rash of them spamming here earlier and we may get a rash of them here after.
I love what you are doing with the churches and not because I'm a troll. I mean yes, I'm a fucking troll, mostly reformed, but it's not that. I think it's important to be seen and known as a human and a part of the community and to be a person who has ethics and believes this can be figured out!
That doesn't happen unless you go and seek communities to be seen by, and to be a good example of your fundamental beliefs for.
But here you're going into a den of things much more fucked in the head than lions.
*
Fascism and killing gays and enslaving women.