I like your name. Slave of Truth. I'm "Flaming Sword". Perhaps we should share or join them:
Flaming sword wielded by slave of truth. Or Slave of truth with flaming sword. Either one works for me.
I'll tell you what I think I need to be protected from in this country - religious fundamentalism of all kinds, whether it is Jews, Muslims, Christians, Mormons or whatever. I'm a pagan I suppose with mildly animistic beliefs. Now I'm not out crusading with my beliefs or trying to make other people adhere to them. I know that the beliefs are fallible as am I. What really, really bothers me is when people refer to documents which I consider highly suspect and promote them as absolutes that can't be questioned.
There are people that equate secular humanism and atheism. They are not the same nor does it matter if they were. Very few atheists I know are out knocking on doors, forming lobbies and generally trying to convert religious people to atheism. But maybe some are. I think true atheism as a certainty that there is[are] NO g[G]od[s] is as foolish as someone who claims there is one with equal conviction. The absolute belief itself without evidence is the problem, not the belief itself which is why I keep harping on that point. Perhaps you don't have absolute beliefs, I don't know, and I don't have an opinion yet.
I feel that people can believe anything they want in private but the public face we all have must be secular or it will cause problems. My metric for morality is provable harm. It must be obvious and likely. I don't need to invoke God to say that polluted drinking water is bad. The belief in God is irrelevant to the position.
Similarly, I don't like it when people of faith claim that "Evolution is a Religion". Evolution is a theory and as such makes predictions based upon observable facts. The predictions are pretty good and lie well with the facts. It is not perfect and is subject to considerable revision (and has changed considerably since Darwin). Religious Creationism, because it is based upon unprovable tenets and ignores facts, should not get equal time because for every self-referencing creation "theory" I could roll out a dozen that are equally self-consistent, yet different. Not one will allow itself to be modified by factual observations that undermine the system. Some have criticized Evolutionists with this, but I think it is fundamentally different. |
