(January 25, 2015 at 8:43 pm)NuclearJaguar Wrote: Yknow when someone is blatantly sugarcoating what they are saying, or making bullshit up to crowd please, so that they do not offend a religious person or group? It usually (but not exclusively) happens when people are discussing Islam and I think it comes from fear about how the Muslims are going to react.
Is there an official word or term to describe this? I think it would be useful to have one.
"Pussy."
"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