(June 12, 2013 at 1:09 pm)Pandas United Wrote: Try looking at the good people do. I know religious people are seen as "enemies" amongst the new atheists (hence the commonly used "anti-theist" derogatory term), but perhaps you can put down your biases for a little bit and see all the good religious folk and organizations do for this world.
I think it's more accurate to say that religion is seen as the enemy by many atheists. Gervais was, as far as I can tell, needling those people who respond to a crisis by offering prayers in place of making a real effort to help. Hey, not everyone can afford to send money to charities or relief efforts and not everyone can hop on a plane or in a car and head over to help directly. But pretending that you contributed something when all you did was talk to yourself for a minute is insulting to those in need. It's like that old joke where someone needs help and cries out "can I get a hand here?" and everyone around begins to applaud.
"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
