(March 25, 2013 at 1:18 am)missluckie26 Wrote: When I was a believer I felt like I was waiting out my time on earth,
My mother is like that even now, and I remember that feeling well when I was a believer. Since the Jehovah's Witnesses constantly teach that the end is very near, the membership tends to live life under the assumption that it's best to spend as much of it in some sort of spiritual activity and at the expense of anything related to actually living life. At various times I expected that I wouldn't have to worry about what high school would be like, or about pursuing higher education after high school, or about whether I'd have a career, etc. Each milestone would pass, and the world was still here.
I have been fortunate enough that the work ethic that I learned from my dad and the fact that one of my interests (computers) provided a very valuable skill to my employer allowed me to turn a job sorting mail and making copies into a career in IT. Otherwise I might be bagging groceries at a local supermarket and wondering if things might have been different.
"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