(March 16, 2013 at 9:43 pm)Lion IRC Wrote: My point would be that the atheist could not do it because they would not think/hope there was going to be an afterlife.
Even if the theist DOES go to heaven they have STILL sacrificed their earthly/secular life while the atheist is still alive.
But the theist 'knows' that he has another existence to fall back on. You sacrifice one consciousness for another, better one. The atheist is pondering an actual sacrifice, as opposed to a momentary inconvenience. To offer up the only existence you'll ever have is a real sacrifice. To give up the remaining years in a lifetime that will be a microsecond compared to the eternity you'll spend in an afterlife is no sacrifice at all. It's as if the theist has had the nobility forcibly stripped from him.
"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
