If you disagree on the ideas, you could still be friends with the man
Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?
I'm an atheist, yet I have no problem with being friends with people who are religious. I do, however, have a problem with being friends with someone who ends every conversation with "... and you're going to burn in hell for an eternity". RMS' refusal to accept the possibility that any position other than his own might have value puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with.
"... and you're going to burn in hell
for an eternity"
I never heard him say anything like that in his speeches.
Maybe I have a short memory, unless you mean the short NO answers he gives to people that ask whether bending the rules a little is OK to do or maybe you're referring to how he hasn't given up on correcting people about the GNU/Linux naming. I also heard multiple times about how he holds the FSF members to these higher standards.
But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable. And compared to Christianity, a faith based on non-falsifiable beliefs, Stalman was proven right again and again.
Maybe he just got tired of repeating everything like a broken record? Maybe, just maybe, he worked for his whole life trying to build the GNU operating system without the results he wanted? And to put salt to the injury, OS X built on top of those tools. Wouldn't you be pretty pissed about it?
He's not young anymore, he may not have the same patience or pragmatism of 20 year old. He does sound like an old grump. His idealism is kind of obnoxious.
But regardless of that, he's one of those people that pushes the human race forward. It's OK, you don't have to be friends with him to give him a little respect.
"But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable."
I'm guessing you haven't asked a very wide variety of Christians that question? Because in my experience you'd get a pretty wide variety of different answers...
I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions:
1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.)
2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds?
3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it?
4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion?
These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.
Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post:
1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all.
2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."
3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..."
All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...
From my experience there are 2 kinds of Christians: those that believe in the New Testament and those that reinterpret it here and there to suit their own feelings about what is right and wrong (after all, a father wouldn't punish his children for all eternity and why punish a good man, even if he's an atheist?).
However the New Testament doesn't really leave room for interpretation on this one. Non-believers will burn, says so Jesus. And if you ask any priest from any of the major Christian churches, like Catholic, Eastern Orthodox (my own), Protestant, the answer will be without doubt Yes.
Of course, there's always Jehova's witnesses, that simply rewrote the bible, but I don't think that counts.
There's nothing wrong with inventing your own religion based on a good set of moral values, especially casting away anything that leads to hatred of other people (dare I say it, Jesus would probably agree) and I do that myself, however I wouldn't shout from the roof-tops that I'm a Christian as that would be a little bending of the truth.
Since Vatican II, the official Catholic position is that salvation is open to non-believers. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe similarly. In fact, most protestant denominations believe the same thing. Your opinion is not held by the majority of Christian denominations.
(From Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also.")
Stallman is an atheist, but he uses religious expressions and extreme caricatures like that to be funny. If you're mortally offended, you're taking it the wrong way. He can be very witty, if your skin is thick enough to appreciate his sense of humor.
At a science fiction convention in the 80's, Mike and I (who worked for "Evil Software Hoarder" Unipress on Gosling's "Evil" commercial version of Emacs) ran across RMS:
Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
I don't want to speak for anyone, but while Stallman definitely thinks that using work created from a differing ideological perspective is seriously problematic, one shouldn't assume the same from people who disagree with him.
Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?
Yes. Depends on definition of evil, I guess.
P.S. in Stallman case I guess definition of evil goes something like this: "I think with your rules you're doing harm to long term development of intellectual property like software. You're evil and you will burn in hell." Pretty mild definition of evil in my opinion?
Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?
I'm an atheist, yet I have no problem with being friends with people who are religious. I do, however, have a problem with being friends with someone who ends every conversation with "... and you're going to burn in hell for an eternity". RMS' refusal to accept the possibility that any position other than his own might have value puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with.