And yet, each side so doesn't understand the place from which the other side comes.EmperorSubcutaneous said:
To be sure, I don't understand Christianity. Rather, I have my hypotheses about why Christianity is popular, but I don't understand how the bibles could be regarded as either a reliable source of scientific truth [http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm], except via ignorance, self-delusion or creative auditing.
Still Christians base their worldviews from the presumed sacredness of the Old and New Testaments, for good or, as often demonstrated by legislators pushing against the progress of equality, for ill.
Atheists* base their worldviews on recognizable patterns in collected observations of nature. Functional consistency of the natural order is one of the first things we learn as toddlers (such as when learning to walk, or to rely on object permanence) so it's debatable whether this is a precept on which only people of science depend.
* That is, hard atheists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)] get off.
Incidentally, it was Richard Dawkins speaking at TED in 2002 [http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html] who, still reeling from the expression of the power of faith exhibted in New York and Washington DC, September 11, 2001, called upon the world to challenge (for once) the idea that belief based purely on faith is necessarily a good thing.
And indeed, Wong specifically did cite Falwell's death as an example, and Athiests dancing on the forums, without a juxtaposed example from the other side. I simply mentioned Dr. Tiller's example as one more recent, and there are people who still believe Dr. Tiller deserved to be assassinated, which seems to me to be one step further from just wishing someone would expire from natural causes.
And his point, that people can be dicks on either side, is not lost. Some people, regardless of ideology, are dicks. I would speculate that plenty more people engage in dickery in the name of Christianity than do in the name of science, (in contrast to those who engage in dickery but happen to be Christian / atheist) unless you're talking things such as animal testing, in which case, those evils produce results for which we are (or should be) thankful.
But to quote Mr. Wong:
Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.
In other words, Wong believes cold logic fails to provide for social morality the way divine accountability does. It's a common fallacy amongs believers (not always Christian) that it is only the fear of God's hammer that keeps us in line. Nonsense. No-one navigates through high-speed freeway traffic brandishing a two-ton lethal weapon, gets cut off and flipped off, and then is stayed merely by the pending wrath of the almighty. Neither the divine, nor the illusion of free will are necessary to keep us doing right; there are both evolutionary and logical reasons for it. As Einstein noted If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Okay, I went overboard, but it's really disturbing how many believe we godless are by causation unscrupulous. The people of the US (surveyed) would rather a radical Muslim as a president sooner than an ethically sound atheist, and, frankly, that terrifies me.
