RE: Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?
November 29, 2016 at 11:20 pm
(November 29, 2016 at 5:24 pm)Asmodee Wrote: Yeah, I have a JW friend try to convert me every month or two and he has often given me the "It was a different time" BS explanation.
Ugh, don't remind me... I was raised a JW.
My response to the notion that God allowed cultural identities to keep him from acting is to point out that there were plenty of times when God took decisive and brutal action for all kinds of reasons. He struck down a man whose only crime was to try and steady the ark of the covenant when the oxen carrying it stumbled. He slaughtered 70,000 Israelites because their king took a census. He wiped out 99.99% of all life on the planet because he was angry with how they were behaving.
But slavery? Equality for women? Newp. I guess that --for a person whose method of dealing with things was usually to kill first and ask questions later-- he simply lacked the quality of nuance.
"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