smudge wrote:
It's just that you get athiests who like to say things like, "It doesn't exist. That's that" believing that they are actually adding a point to a discussion. You're like...yeh, OK, I know you think that. I don't care. It may as well be me saying to them, "God exists. Fact". It's meaningless. They're not proving anything by stating those things, especially when they keep doing it. That's just preaching.
Yeah, it's amazing how they complain about the same behavior from religious people too. Sheer hypocrisy. It seems that people on all sides of the aisle show a lack of interest in assessing or discussing things in any meaningful and productive way. So many times I wait while an atheist tells me how stupid I am, and how science has proven my position to be false beyond a doubt. And then we actually get into a discussion of why and how science supports that idea and they can't even properly explain to me things like cosmology, the half-life of carbon, ancient history, etc. because they never even took the time to come to a rudimentary understanding of it all. I don't know how many times I've had carbon dating waggled in my face by a person who didn't even understand what it was or how it worked.
Lots of times I just end up thinking to myself: "You've probably never even heard of a c14 molecule, special relativity, the CMB (cosmic microwave background radiation) or the planck temperature." I really doubt that a lot of people could countenance the fact that theism is not only alive and well in the academic world, but flourishing. They've got to read their fringe authors like Crossan, Ehrman, Dawkins, Sagan, etc. who aren't even respected by their academic peers. How is it that popular science and popular academics in general turned into the fringe? I wonder how people would take it if they learned that the majority of physicists aren't atheists.
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There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance.
Nahj ul-Balāgha by Ali bin Abu-Talib