Tanner wrote:Serious Discussion Post of the Year. When you're good, you're good, Suki.
Why, thank you. But don't worry, I'll inevitably revert to posting something rabid and embarrassing, and probably soon.
maxson wrote:Humanity's been around for a long fucking time. Each side has had, literally, all the time in the world to formulate answers to questions, so there's never going to be a question from one side that can't be answered by the other side.
If I can be facetious for a sec...
Christianity will actually
always have an answer to any question you can ask, and it'll be the same one they've been using for thousands of years: a magic man did it. And from my point of view, this means that for any question, Christianity is guaranteed to have the wrong answer.
But more seriously: What draws me to the answers given by science over those given by any flavor of religion or spiritualism is not the fact that an answer is given, but the fact that the answer comes from a process I trust.
If you held a world forum and asked a question like, "how did humans come to be," then answers like "humans transformed out of other animals" and "we were made and placed here by a higher intelligence" would, because they do not show the process for obtaining these answers, be on the same level as any other origin story, such as "the Sun was chasing his little sister, the Moon, and one day they bumped into each other, and the Moon cried tears which became mankind." If you only evaluate the answers based on the content of the answer, without a critical evaluation of how those giving the answers arrived at them, then I am not at all surprised that you might think that accepting one answer being offered over another boils down to personal taste.
If you were to follow up this question with, "and how did you arrive at your answer," you will find that only a tiny fraction of all answers provided by our world's countless cultures and religions are in any way trustworthy. The Theory of Evolution is obviously a prime example of an answer that has its act together, and heck, if we pretend for a moment that Intelligent Design isn't merely Creationism in a cheap tuxedo, it would be among the wheat separated from the chaff. And that chaff will primarily be answers supported only by, "that's what my elders told me," and, "we believe that a magic guy did basically all of the hard stuff."
I don't dismiss the origin story that you accept because I think mine is cooler, or because of some rebellious inclination to oppose any idea with the word "God" in it, but because the origin story you accept is totally unsubstantiated guesswork without a scrap of evidence in its favor, and the one I do believe offers details, within as excruciating a degree as you care to ask, about every step taken toward the answer found, and every one of those steps is rational and consistent with the others. If the origin stories were girls, mine is the one that can hold an interesting conversation. "Beauty without intelligence is a masterpiece painted on a napkin."
...my focus is wandering, but I think I've made my point clear.
