(February 9, 2014 at 3:16 am)Rayaan Wrote: 1. Have any of you atheists here while you were an atheist, prayed to God (or gods) in certain circumstances in your life, especially like in desperate times or in troublesome times?I haven't. I prayed plenty when I was a believer, though there came a point when I stopped doing so regularly. By the time I came to the realization that I was an atheist, I had stopped altogether.
Rayaan Wrote:2. A small percentage of atheists said that they do pray (at least weekly or monthly) even though they don't believe in God. Are those people really atheists, then?That depends on the person, though someone who regularly prays to a deity with the expectation of some outcome doesn't strike me as an atheist. That (regular prayer) seems a lot different from the guy at the racetrack muttering "come on, number 6" under his breath or the person who whimpers "oh no, don't tell me it's going to rain" as she prepares a picnic basket.
I still use "good heavens" as an exclamation, but it's not because I think there's a heaven. Well, not the one in the sky with god and angels, anyway...
"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
