RE: To those who were once believers and are now atheists, some advice?
March 19, 2014 at 8:30 am
(This post was last modified: March 19, 2014 at 8:32 am by Tonus.)
(March 18, 2014 at 10:54 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: I can't help but wondered what glued us all together. Almost at times like the friendships just never happened at all.I would think that their friendship was genuine, and that they are conflicted by what they have chosen to do, but they feel that there is no choice. It is one of the saddest ways in which religion harms people, by demanding that they put loyalty to an unconfirmed god ahead of anything and everything else. When a neighbor's dog tells David Berkowitz to kill people, society decides that he is insane. When an ancient book tells you to turn your back on a friend, society decides that you're a devout and good person who only wants what is best for your friend.
And that's just sick.
"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
