So you're saying it's possible that the earth is oval shaped?
Is the earth a perfect sphere? I don't know, I'd have to ask a geologist. But I would certainly be willing to entertain the possibility that the earth is not perfectly round, particularly if available data suggested that.
Your comments on atrocities reveal a basic lack of understanding. Science and religion have fundamentally different roles here. Religion has actively provoked people to go out and slaughter each other (though it may be reasonably argued that in the absence of religion people would have found other reasons). Science does not drive anyone to kill anyone else. It merely provides tools. Humans have used those tools to do great good. They have also used those tools to do great harm. That doesn't say anything about those tools. It says a good deal about people.
The world is, IMHO, worse off now than 5,000 years ago.
Why do you say that? I think it's improved immeasurably, and I suspect that you need to read a bit more history.
My "solution" is simply to continue as we have begun, with the process of social evolution. Great strides have been made in the last few hundred years, even in the last 50. 200 years ago slavery was accepted practice in most of the world. 100 years ago educated people argued passionately that war was a good thing, a necessary means by which the strong displaced the weak. Only a few decades ago the idea that nations might group together to enforce a basic standard of human rights was unthinkable. Today that system is still barely functional, but the idea has caught hold and we have the capacity to improve the mechanisms. A century ago half the population of the world - the female half - was almost universally considered inferior, and essentially held in bondage. In many parts of the world that bondage is completely broken, and other parts will catch up.
I could go on, and on. But to take one item: do you not consider the idea that the authority of government derives from the consent of the governed to be progress?
I believe Jesus is real and is God. That keeps me from falling too deep into what I call depravity.
Odd. I place Jesus and God in the same category as Zeus, Odin, and Ra, but I have no noticeable tendency to slip into depravity. Perhaps your instincts are more depraved than mine; I wouldn't know. But I've always thought it odd that people should require a myth to inspire them to do what there are already so many practical and sensible reasons for doing. |
