(July 18, 2014 at 5:07 am)Amalynne0 Wrote: He's a genuine, heartfelt guy, but he's choosing to feel rather than think. How can I reason with that?? I just don't know.I think that religion mostly comes down to 'feeling, rather than thinking.' Whether or not you can reason with him depends on how far gone he is, and you're a better judge than I, since you know him and since I couldn't do more than skim the letter. Perhaps your best approach is not to try to reason with him. Just tell him why you're an atheist, and leave it at that. Don't bother with follow-up letters; my guess is that he'll see it as his duty to harass you, because if it gets you 'back in the fold' he's done his job.*
*Which is another of the ways in which religion is harmful- it can convince people that the means do not matter, because if saving you from hellfire requires that they do or say very mean or nasty or stupid things, then that's what they have to do.
"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
