(August 21, 2014 at 1:35 am)Goosebump Wrote: Basically is there any political, sociological, economical benefit to being Atheist, Agnostic, Gnostic or Deist or any I missed as apposed to being in an organized religion?That depends on your community, although I would not split it along religious and non-religious lines. For example, a deeply-religious community may be less tolerant of an atheist member and that could affect him politically, economically, and so on. But the community may also be less tolerant of a religious person who doesn't represent the local religion (say a Muslim in a mostly Christian community, or even a Protestant in a mostly Catholic community, and so on). But this can be true to a lesser extent if a person who supports a particular sports team lives in a region where his team's rival is extremely popular.
I think it's more a question of demographics than it is of ideology.
"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
