(March 23, 2014 at 3:48 pm)OGirly Wrote: One of these friends of mine is rather religious herself, and since has been constantly dogging me to come along with her to her church. She says you don't even have to believe in God, and that it's more for the community aspect of religion.One of the more effective ways of putting pressure on a person to (1)join a church and (2)remain a member is that same "community." Once you're in, the threat of losing face with the community --or of being shunned by it-- can be very effective in keeping you from leaving.
Yesterday morning my mother left me a flyer from the Jehovah's Witnesses, inviting people to their annual memorial of Christ's death. She told me that it "may be the last one that [they] observe, because Armageddon is this close." She held her forefinger and thumb about a quarter-inch apart, for emphasis. I smiled but felt sad for her, as this is the same sort of nonsense that they've been peddling for more than a century, and she's seen some form of it or another since the mid-60s when she first joined them.
I distrust any attempt to get someone to visit for some sense of community or anything that isn't an admission that if you experience it, you might be convinced to join. That is the desire, after all. Trying to dress it up as something else should be a reason to turn and run, IMO.
"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
