(April 14, 2014 at 10:09 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: In reading through this thread, I'm reminded of my days following Christianity, and I think religion promotes a fear of death.It promotes an inordinately huge reward/punishment system where you start off on the "debit" side of the ledger and cannot ever feel as if you've moved to the "credit" side of it. Christians believe that we cannot ever do enough to deserve the reward and since the payout is either/or, you must spend this life on a treadmill, where you must keep running towards the reward or risk falling back into the punishment.
The only possible value that this life has is in finishing on the right side of that dividing line. It doesn't matter how you accomplish this; just get the reward and you can spend all of eternity in pure bliss. Makes you wonder why so many Christians seem to spend so much time in anything other than purely Christian pursuits. The reward is so disproportionate to the effort that you'd expect them to spend all day in a room praying fervently and only ever stepping outside to offer up their cheeks for slapping.
"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
