(October 14, 2014 at 9:23 am)Rhythm Wrote: Isn't it common knowledge that the religious don't exactly toe the line to their own horseshit (not even limited to any holy book) with any regularity? Frankly, I'm relieved that they don't.Not just that, but so many of them follow it by rote, and therefore the way that they represent their faith or their religion can change from person to person, even among adherents to the same denomination. Grab two people from any specific denomination and ask them questions about their beliefs and you might get very divergent accounts and explanations. Even for things that might seem as important as "who is god" or what god's nature is.
Even the theists who visit here --most of whom have given far more thought to those questions than your average believer, IMO-- cannot agree on such questions or explanations and have a fairly broad range of beliefs on various topics and questions. That does two things: it gives theists a way to avoid some of the discussion by concentrating on the things that atheists "get wrong" about them regarding their individual beliefs, and it confirms to the atheist that those beliefs are an incoherent mess that cannot be reconciled even by the people who claim to adhere to them.
"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
