(March 25, 2013 at 8:45 pm)jstrodel Wrote: You are so proud. Why can't you listen to others?
I'd like to point something out here, because this is the... hundred billionth or so time that you've ignored a question or comment and tried to psychoanalyze me or guess at my motivations or even determine what I think.
The name-calling and put downs don't bother me. Hey, I tend to be a pretty snarky asshole a fair amount of the time, and I'm sure it irritates people, so they fire back. That's cool, doesn't bother me. You theists take a good amount of shit here, and I think it's completely fair that you fire back. Heck, I admire that any of you visit forums like this at all- I didn't have the nerve to do so when I was a believer.
Even the fluff is pretty fair. I wonder aloud at why theists might believe as they do, mostly because I am a snarky asshole. So it doesn't bother me that you spend so many paragraphs trying to create some kind of FBI-worthy profile of me. But if you lose sight of the discussion, you get very very BORING.
To me, the discussion is prime. Your motivations mean exactly jack and shit to me. The important thing is whether the discussion leads me to learn anything new. Paragraph after paragraph explaining what is wrong with me or with atheists in general is useless, but if there is at least an attempt at discussing the topic, I'm willing to read through it.
Now, if you think that it's not worth discussing the topic with me and all I deserve is for you to go all Sigmund Freud on my ass, that works. Since I have no interest in reading page after page of you being spectacularly wrong about what makes me tick, you can fill your spew quota of the day without worrying that I'll make fun of your big brother in the sky. If you've actually got something that's on topic, I'll be happy to consider it.
"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