(October 17, 2013 at 10:40 am)ronedee Wrote: Agreed! But generalization isn't fair either! I think we need to really see the motives in a person to see the "real" person!
I just think the generalization is along the lines of "this is what people do" than it is "this is what Christians do" or "this is what atheists do." I think that on most of the larger moral and ethical issues (killing, sexual crimes, honesty) people will tend to agree because societies experience more harmony and less chaos that way. And once we have those agreed upon, we can afford to quibble on the others (swearing, rap music, porn). I think that while the discussion often revolves around accusations of the larger issues, those are the ones we tend to agree on. It's the lesser ones that are the real bone of contention.
And while religion serves as something of a backdrop to some of it, it also seems to be part of our psychological makeup. As they get older, children seem driven to defy their parents. Did so many young ladies swoon over Elvis because they saw him gyrating his hips, or was it because they saw how their parents reacted to it?
"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
