"While in principle I'm glad I have the freedom to have sex with a man (and would prefer if e.g. it became illegal to fire me for doing so), I don't think I'd ever take advantage of that freedom."
Thing is, I'm pretty sure I would... as soon as I've finished cutting all ties with my ancestral land so that the consequences wouldn't come to bite me in some roundabout way. But I might not be that prudent or patient. Give me liberty and give me cock(adooloo)! :P
Now, for the misunderstanding:
"and you immediately pattern-matched me as a racist and decided to ignore me. "
Not quite. I just decided the chance was high enough that I wasn't willing to risk my time and effort. Not quite the same thing as pegging you as guilty until proven otherwise and then dismissing you outright.
"What would you think about someone who responded the same way to the suggestion that god didn't exist, or that astrology didn't work, or that the earth was six billion years old?"
That they've been faced with people promoting these ideas who were both smug and unconvincing, engaged them in good faith, and got burned for it, learning nothing and feeling hurt and insulted. I would blame those people who ruined the audience for me, like a salesman finding a hostile populace in the wake of Howard Hill.
And I've met atheists who were jerks (Atheism Warriors?), back when I was religious, in societies where they were powerful enough that they could take their stance for granted. If it weren't for my confidence in my own capacity to counter their arguments (my actual belief in the dragon in my garage), and my endless reserves of youthful energy, Same for Trotskyst and Anarchist jerks ("Engineers are the most alienated of all!"), libertarian jerks ("Poverty? What's poverty? Having less cable channels than the neighbors?"), and so on and so forth.
At my age, please forgive me for being very cautious about engaging anyone who even looks like a Warrior of any sort in debate. If we get to know each other later and I find that I can trust you not to be a Warrior, I'll discuss this at length with you... by PM (because, frankly, our reputation is bad enough as is).
Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it