When I was a believer, it was pretty important to 'save souls' by reaching out to as many people as possible. Coming to the realization that things don't work that way, I am far less concerned with whether people convert to my way of thinking. In part because I still have to deal with family (and the occasional friend or acquaintance) reminding me of just how obnoxious proselytizing can be. And it's not just religion, either; Yesterday I got a facebook message from a friend asking me to sign a petition to demand that the government come clean on the 9/11 conspiracy. I sighed and closed the message without as much as a reply. Hey, if you want to believe in crazy shit and aren't a complete douchebag, I can deal. I was a fundamentalist Christian at one time in my life, after all.
"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
