RE: Stupid things religious people say
January 4, 2025 at 2:59 pm
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2025 at 3:00 pm by Tonus.)
Yeah, that comment from him is a good example of the tightrope that he walks. I've seen other interviews (I think Rationality Rules had a video about it) where his explanation of his concept of god and of some of the Biblical stories is unlike anything I ever heard in church or from other Christians. More like phsychiatry than religion. I think guys like him want to straddle the line; they don't want to have to earnestly defend the wackiness of the Bible, but his audience is probably mostly Christian and he doesn't want to alienate them. It reminds me of a few other conservative voices who try to never mention religion unless it's superficial.
I think the political right is coming to a crossroads with regards to Christianity. There are still a lot of Americans who are devout believers, and the GOP cannot afford to abandon that demographic (although their support for Trump makes me think that they are a lot more forgiving than might have been expected). But I think that demographic is shrinking, and if they really want to become a 'big tent' or attract more rational thinkers, they have to know that their leading voices will, eventually, be non-religious, if not outright atheist.
I think the political right is coming to a crossroads with regards to Christianity. There are still a lot of Americans who are devout believers, and the GOP cannot afford to abandon that demographic (although their support for Trump makes me think that they are a lot more forgiving than might have been expected). But I think that demographic is shrinking, and if they really want to become a 'big tent' or attract more rational thinkers, they have to know that their leading voices will, eventually, be non-religious, if not outright atheist.
"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