(December 9, 2014 at 11:12 am)Nope Wrote: When I was religious, I was taught to fear myself. Like everyone, I had moments of anger or negative thoughts about others that I never acted upon but my upbringing taught me that without god, I would go crazy and act on those thoughts.I don't think I ever really thought about it from that perspective. I think that even the people who believe that 'without god we become immoral animals' are convinced that they are the exception to that rule.
I can recall that when a JW was disfellowshipped (or left the religion) people would immediately come back with reports about how his/her behavior had deteriorated into an immoral mess, to reinforce the idea that once you abandoned god, you would give yourself over to every hedonistic excess you could imagine. You know, like smoking cigarettes and wearing tight clothing (yay for fundamentalists!). In any case, it's a way of trying to keep people from straying, in case the threat of eternal punishment doesn't do the trick.
"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
