(November 23, 2014 at 5:31 pm)dyresand Wrote: The hell kind of person would want their kids to worship them....I don't think I've ever known a person who wanted his kids to worship him. That, to me, implies a level of obeisance that they reserve for gods or idols (in the latter case, it being seen as an unhealthy obsession). I think most parents want their children to love and respect them, and to show this by becoming a success as they grow up. A god could want this from his creation ("sons and daughters"), but that's not the same as demanding worship on pain of eternal punishment.
And depending on the belief system, it's possible that the only thing that god demands is worship; for those denominations that accept deathbed conversions, how you lived has no bearing on your eternal fate: whether or not you agreed to worship forever is the only thing that matters.
"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
