(June 17, 2014 at 8:59 am)LostLocke Wrote: One of the big things I find disturbing about these people is that they are in effect saying, "If it weren't for my religion/faith/god I'd be out there raping people."Right, which is why they undermine that position the moment they use any sort of reasoning for why something is right or wrong, or why they "couldn't" do something.
I know the story of Abraham was brought up recently, and one of the things Godschild said was that Abraham's thought process could be affected by his understanding that god could raise his son back from the dead, and that he had god's promise that he (Abraham) would father a nation. That's all well and good, but let's pretend for a second that god explains to Abraham that the sacrifice means that he will lose his son forever and that another patriarch will be chosen to father god's chosen people. Would killing Isaac still be the right and moral and good action for Abraham to take?
For the Christian the answer is "yes." Because it is what god commanded of Abraham, and Abraham had no right to question or challenge god's command. Regardless of how you arrange the circumstances, if god told Abraham to kill his son then the right and moral and good thing to do was kill his son. Yet many Christians, when faced with the question, find it difficult to answer just "yes" or "no." Clearly they find the act of killing their child to be so awful that even under the circumstance that god demanded it, they hesitate. Why? What standard are they using to judge the killing of a child to be awful?
"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