(November 10, 2018 at 2:46 pm)Mermaid Wrote: I hate people.
Is this what being a skeptic is to you? A giant joke? If it is and you are planning to be cynical about it you are wasting your own time and ours as well.
Here is for instance a trailer for a documentary called "Death by Medicine" based on a book by the same name that claims how FDA is a criminal organization that is trying to kill people, that hospitals are places where people are tortured and not healed and that you have better chance of getting well by praying to Jesus than taking "FDA's medicine"
And if you think people don't take it for granted you are being cynical. Here is one example: The First Century Gospel church is run by the Reverend Nelson Ambrose Clark, who preached to his parishioners that they should not take medical help when needed but simply pray. He was known as saying "Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs."
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/201012...wAll=y&c=y
He relied heavily on this book I mentioned Death by Medicine (2010) by Gary Null and Martin Feldman as justification for his belief that people are better off with faith healing or just plain prayer. Although even earlier in 1991 nearly five hundred children at his church and the nearby Faith Tabernacle Congregation, whose views on medicine are similar, fell sick with measles, six of them dying.
So you see being a skeptic is no laughing matter. As such you are an activist or more precisely an adult among religious people that don't know how to think rationally. You have to be prepared to intervene when you find yourself in a situation where some religious person wants to leave his or her child to be cured by elves, jinns, virgin Mary, Jesus, angels and what not.
You may say "I don't know any such people" maybe you don't but maybe you get a call in 2 in the morning by some Christian or Muslim friend that has such friends and can't talk them out of not letting their kid be treated by medicine. Because religious people themselves can't talk out those religious people denying medicine since the talk would go like this
"You have to give your kid to be treated by science."
"Why should I since science was so wrong like with evolution and shape of the earth."
"Well yeah, that was wrong but this is not."
"Are you joking? It's all wrong. If one is wrong then all is wrong. Not let me pray to Jesus to heal my child."
So you see this is why we have topics like this one. So we can exchange data, experiences and when the time comes we are prepared.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
