(March 13, 2014 at 2:26 pm)Chad32 Wrote: My grandmother would rather I shut out everything that goes against the bible too. That should be a red flag for anyone.The JWs are also extremely strict about this. Reading religious material that is not from the Watchtower Society is frowned upon (atheistic material would fall under this, even if it's not technically religious). Reading anti-JW material can lead to charges of apostasy, which they treat as an unforgivable trespass against the organization. I wondered about this, but never crossed those lines. It seemed to me that if you really had the truth, then nothing could stand against it. So why be afraid of challenging it?
There was an unexpected benefit from the WT stance, in that I did not even glance at any non-JW literature or material until long after I'd decided that I was an atheist. I didn't have a period of time where I wondered if my doubts were genuine or not or 'poisoned' by opposing viewpoints. Reading such material afterwards was really more comforting than anything else, in that it confirmed what I had suspected and strengthened my viewpoint.
"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
