Why do theists spend so much time debating why atheists debate the existence of god?
I think the more intriguing consideration is that neither an abundance nor a lack of religious belief seems to have curbed the bloodthirsty attitudes and actions of men, organizations, societies, and nations in the past. If there really was a god, wouldn't there be a much clearer dividing line between the way men acted when they believed in him, and how the acted when they didn't? It's almost as if religious belief didn't matter, one way or another. Hey, religion! Nice job bringing all of humanity together in brotherhood and love for the past few thousand years!
(October 2, 2013 at 9:34 am)Tortino Wrote: Well, we have seen , an absence of religious belief has been the biggest destruction in terms of killings in human history.
Joseph Stalin killed over 20 million people
Mao Zedong killed 45 million...
Pol Pot killed around 1.7 million.
I am sorry, but the atrocities in the name of religion pale significantly when compared to people who killed when they had the absence of religious belief. Did their lack of belief cause them to kill? Who knows, but no direct link can be made. However, how can the teachings of Jesus be reconciled to killing someone? Killing and then attributing it to the teachings of Christianity is as non sequitur as me killing someone and saying I am doing it in the name of the New York Yankees.
I think the more intriguing consideration is that neither an abundance nor a lack of religious belief seems to have curbed the bloodthirsty attitudes and actions of men, organizations, societies, and nations in the past. If there really was a god, wouldn't there be a much clearer dividing line between the way men acted when they believed in him, and how the acted when they didn't? It's almost as if religious belief didn't matter, one way or another. Hey, religion! Nice job bringing all of humanity together in brotherhood and love for the past few thousand years!
"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
