(May 22, 2013 at 2:24 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: No pretending required, Joseph Stalin is receiving justice as we speak for murdering 50 million of his fellow countryman. If God didn’t exist then he got off Scot free and died one of the most powerful men in the World. I take comfort in knowing justice was served.I would consider it a small comfort if he was enduring punishment for his crimes, since I would rather that he had not been allowed to carry out such acts in the first place. Leaving us to our own devices, only to reward or punish us after the end, strikes me as unsatisfying.
When I think of the ones whose time on Earth was cut short quickly and brutally, I wonder if their time here had any value? At the least, those who are granted the gift of a heavenly afterlife may not have gotten any chance at enjoying their time in the flesh. Do you feel that hey get another shot at it somehow, or was that short and bitter existence all they were granted, and they are probably better off just forgetting it as they delight in their heavenly reward? It seems pointless to me to have that happen to them.
"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
