How to avoid losing respect for friends

[compass]

The simplest way to keep friends to be a friend. If you are unable to accept a person as he/she is ,without trying to change them,you are not their friend. I have know my best friend for 40 almost years. We often have a coffee and an argument.I am fairly left wing in a lot of my views,he is very right wing in a lot of his. Our last robust discussion ended when I called him 'a misogynist prick' and we each claimed victory.

I 100% agree but can I ask you, the debates you have would be based on personal view points, in other words, there is no right or wrong, only personal opinion.

I can handle that type of debate, but when there is a definitive right and wrong then it is no longer a debate.

If your friend swore that milk came from chickens he would be wrong. You would try and teach him the truth but he would both refuse to look at the proof and simultaneously insist that he is correct and you are wrong.

Could you handle that or would it effect your friendship?

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Creation science is not a science, it's a hypothesis with not a hint of evidence to back it up.

A scientific hypothesis. We might agree on the validity of the evidence.

It is also not thinking outside the box. Creation science is done by blinkered Christians who want it to be real, but offer nothing in evidence.

I wasn't talking about CS here.

The United States National Academy of Sciences states that "creation science is in fact not science and should not be presented as such." and that "the claims of creation science lack empirical support and cannot be meaningfully tested."

Like I said, I agree with this. That doesn't alter what CS proponents themselves believe that they are doing, which is using a scientific defence, and never a religious one.

So my point at the OP stands. He rejects a scientific argument, and not a religious one.

I don't have a clue what you are talking about, sorry! I can show you evidence for evolution. We can fly to Iceland and dig and find fossils, then dig deeper and find the same species with a slightly different skeleton and so on until we "SEE" the slight changes over time. Now, what evidence do you have that someone placed all the animals here? Do you think that dogs were around when the dinosaurs were around? I (honestly) don't get it.

14 billion years ago the universe was not created with us in mind. If it was, then He can predict the future. If He can predict the future then why send down Jesus knowing that it would fail and cause war and change nothing?

Humans are unique amoung all living creatures in that they have a concept and understanding of death. We know one day we will die. There may be a handful of other animals with a similar understanding, but it's highly unlikely they will dwell on it as much as we do. The notion of death is understandibly horrifying to most people and for thousands of years we have longed for a way of aquiring endless life. Religion has provided this by offering the story of an immortal soul that lives on even after we perrish.

The problem many people have nowadays is that here is no proof that this immortality exists. Professor Micheo Kaku, one of the worlds most respected physasists commented, "with remarkable claims, we require remarkable proof".

For me, the remarkable claims of a soul and afterlife appear all the more fansiful when we consider how people thought when those claims originated. Even the great thinkers were speculating with little more than guesswork. For example, in the 17th century an Arch Boshop from Dublin decided to pinpoint when time begun, or to be more precise, when God created the world. James Usher spent 20 years reading through a collosal personal library of 10,000 volumes to tie together family trees and historical claims from many different cultures. He finally concluded that the world was created on 22nd October 4004 BC.

We now know this to be totally incorrect. Even with all the knowledge of ancient texts, piled high and studied carefully, we find no reliability in many of the remarkable claims the Bible talks about. As civilisations progress they aquire more and more robust information on just about all aspects of their life and environment. The further back you go, the less information is available and conversly the grander the claims become.

Our need to understand death and our desires to conqour it have driven us to belive in almost anything, so long as it offers hope.