(July 25, 2013 at 11:37 am)Minimalist Wrote: "Logic" works great unless you start with a flawed premise like, oh, I don't know, "there's a god who created the whole fucking universe and he really loves me as long as I kiss his ass."
I think that this is the issue. When you have a specific core belief that you accept uncritically, you spend a lot of time and effort making everything else conform to that belief. It would be impossible for me to fathom it if I hadn't been through that phase myself. I can understand why so many hang on to it; when I finally realized what the problem was, it was a real smack-to-the-forehead moment.
It's also why I don't think too much about all the years I wasted; getting out at all was a pretty low probability, all things considered.
"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
