(April 23, 2013 at 12:35 am)Dawud Wrote: The reason that Im harping on is that Im trying to disprove Rhythms hypothesis that atheism has no effect in people's lives which is total BS.
I think it's more accurate to say that religion has an effect on people's lives, including atheists, since religion affects society in so many ways. The primary difference between my life now and when I was a believer was that I spent time on religion then, that I do not now. That time is filled by more of the things that I did the rest of the time. I guess that is an effect of atheism, for someone who deconverted. For someone who was always an atheist, I am not sure I see where it affects them outside of the influence of religion.
To put it another way-- if everyone was an atheist and there was no religion, how would atheism affect people's lives? Compare that to the opposite scenario-- if everyone was religious and there were no atheists, would religion affect people's lives?
"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
