(December 24, 2014 at 4:37 pm)DIRTY_DEEDS_93 Wrote: My name is Drew, I'm 15, and I need help figuring out what I am.For starters, you're a 15-year-old named Drew.
But seriously, what you describe would be an atheist, though I don't know how to categorize your belief in ghosts and other such phenomena. As for your mother's demands/requests, you're under 18 and thus you're her responsibility and I would just go along with it. Once you are old enough to make your own decisions and go your own way, you are free to skip the church visits. But in time you might find that your efforts in keeping the peace are worthwhile. But always remember: people will use guilt to make you feel bad about following your own path, and that's not fair. If they won't respect your beliefs, then their hurt feelings are NOT YOUR FAULT.
I probably sound like a broken record, but it bugs the shit out of me when people act as if their beliefs make it okay to be disrespectful while insisting that you must respect their beliefs. That is religious indoctrination at work, and it's a terrible thing to do to a person. Reject it. If they can't show you respect, they'd better not expect any back.
"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
