Facebook Post

I ran out of room for the comment on Facebook, so I just posted it here :)

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point. No personal offense is intended here (as I think you’re an awesome guy and certainly wouldn’t want to alienate you or come off as being rude), but I pretty much disagree with your entire post. In a perfect world no one would share their religious beliefs with anyone else at all, so a live and let live philosophy would work just fine. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where religion is unquestionably the biggest driving force in nearly every aspect of our lives, from war to politics to medical advancement. People have a moral obligation to not idly sit by and let others continue believing uncontested in any utterly absurd thing they want that obviously isn’t true. When the leader of the free world, and the guy who has access to the nuclear codes, believes that we are in the “end times” and that God wants Russia to invade Israel to trigger the rapture, well then we have a serious problem. On the topic of Evolution, the fact that we have a fossil record in and of itself is a huge argument that can’t be overcome by the religious without resorting to “God put those there to test our faith” statements. The fossil record also isn’t the only thing pointing towards evolution, as there is veritable mountain of evidence suggesting that evolution is responsible for why we are the way we are today. But let’s say for the sake of argument that all those scientists have gotten this just dead wrong (which could be a possibility, based on past scientific findings that were later disproven, but not likely). Even if evolution was an absolute farce that will be disproven in the future, it doesn’t suddenly make the Christian creation myth anymore of a viable option. Whether evolution is a real force or not, the supernatural is still not real. There are no talking snakes or donkeys, no resurrections, no parting seas, no floating disembodied hands that scribble instructions on walls, no bushes that burn-but-are-not-consumed and have big booming voices coming out of them, no crazy prophets who can call down bears to devour upstart children. Even if there was no big bang and there is no natural selection, that doesn’t change the fact that there is still no Santa-Claus-for-adults that has a divine plan for the world. The key word here is “belief.” If someone has to say “I BELIEVE in this thing…” then that ought to tell you that there is no evidence whatsoever to back that belief up, but they are going to go ahead and pretend it’s true anyway.