(June 9, 2013 at 10:07 pm)ronedee Wrote: I'm just wondering what it will be like in "Your Perfect World" w/o God & religion?
Not much different than our present world, is my guess. The majority of the world identifies with some religion or at least professes to a belief in a god or gods, yet there exists so much pain and suffering and awful mistreatment of one another. In some cases this horrid behavior is a result of religious teachings or beliefs.
It seems to me that people will find a way to justify living the life they desire to lead. For most people, this means justifying a relatively virtuous life where they empathize with others and make small sacrifices to promote the well-being of their community and/or society. For others, it means justifying or rationalizing relatively poor behavior or masking it as some kind of virtue in order to fulfill their selfish desires. People do it today, whether they are religious or not. I expect that they'd do the same if there was no religion to hang their good or bad behavior on.
"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
