(May 19, 2013 at 9:07 pm)Freedom Wrote: They really don't believe they are doing that!
If they really believed that god was just an imaginary friend, they would treat him like one.
For me, being raised Christian meant that god's existence was a given, and it wasn't something I bothered to question. If someone had asked me about it, I am certain that I would have insisted that I tested the claim and found it to be the absolute truth. Further questioning would have led to rationalization and deflection and questioning of motives in an attempt to shield the core belief.
So I did indeed imagine god as I was taught to do so by other people who had imagined him. And I did not, at any time prior to my deconversion, believe that I was doing that.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
