(April 7, 2014 at 7:12 pm)Lek Wrote: Secondly, I read what Jesus taught and I see how the world works when it's full of people who ignore those teachings. I'm also agreeing that christians are notorious for disregarding Jesus, so we don't need to do the blame game here.A person who "disregards" Jesus isn't a Christian, IMO. But we should clear some things up here, I think. Christians here will occasionally point to the large number of Christians that there are today, implying (if not outright stating) that such a large number of people can't possibly be wrong. But it doesn't take much to get Christians to play the "no true Christian" game when the behavior of those many are called into question. To say nothing of the fact that many Christian denominations insist that they are the only true Christians and that the other hundreds of millions are not.
This dichotomy is bad enough, but the waters are pretty muddy. Where is the line that separates the true Christian from the rest? Pretty much every Christian will admit that humans are fallen creatures dependent on god's mercy and that we do not deserve salvation on our own merit because we are slaves to sin. Thus, every Christian does "unChristian" things. How do we sort out which of those 2.1 billion Christians "count" and which do not?
"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
