(January 28, 2014 at 12:26 am)The Reality Salesman Wrote: but what about everyone else in my everyday life? All the people I work with or share a day to day life with? Am I stripping them of an otherwise useful placebo source that could have potentially caused them Good when their ability to face reality failed?It seems as if you are giving them to key to getting the most out of life without the anchor of religion. Most won't understand it and will go on as they are, but you might be inspiring a person to much greater things. If the only 'side effect' of religion was that it buffed up people's immune systems, then it might be worth it to accept the delusion. But I'm guessing that you realize that this isn't the case.
"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
