(August 17, 2013 at 10:39 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: As a general principle, I find it commendable that people who feel passionately about a cause advocate strongly for it, it the most civil way possible.
"You're going to burn in hell forever" isn't the most civil way possible.
It isn't the freedom to believe in such ideas, or express them, that is troubling to me. It is the desire by many who hold those ideas to forcefully impose them upon others. Legally if they can, via other means if they cannot. A person who believes that he is motivated by love to take away the freedoms and rights of others will not feel as if he is doing any wrong and is therefore extremely dangerous.
"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
