(April 3, 2014 at 4:15 am)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Silly question. What kills people is not belief or disbelief, but intolerant dogmatic ideology - ain't no one got a monopoly on that.And our crazy drive to form social groups with an us/them mentality, of which religion is just one manifestation. If god is real, we would expect that religion in general (and possibly one religion in particular) would move people to behave differently, yet it has often served as the basis for some of the most reprehensible mistreatment of people for as long as we can tell. To this day, devout religious adherents do terrible things to their fellow humans, regardless of how "peace-promoting" their holy books are supposed to be.
When people try to compare how many people have been killed by atheists versus how many have been killed by Christians, why isn't the Christian side of the ledger ZERO? The history of Christianity should be of a movement that, despite never killing a single person and always aiding its enemies, managed to thrive and bring about a peaceful world in spite of human imperfection because god's rules cannot help but produce such a result. How many Christians have actually acted like Christians when they look at the 100 million body count they ascribe to atheists and their best response is "at least we didn't kill that many!"
"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
