(March 20, 2013 at 2:17 pm)barbend Wrote: Atheism is stereotypically viewed as cold, scientific and unemotional, but I contest that rather it is the pinnacle of self-enlightenment and spirituality.
I like to think of atheism as the natural default state of man. To accept what we can see. To accept what we can understand. Above all, to accept what we can confirm, what we can verify. To use all of our faculties to discover our world, instead of using emotion to turn it into a confused jumble.
A spectacular vista or touching experience can move me, possibly even to tears. But that's not religion or spirituality, that's emotion. Religion feeds on our emotions. You can boil most theistic arguments and explanations to an over-reliance on emotion at the expense of reason and rational thinking.
"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
