Since there is no God to hand down morality and punish you for disagreeing everything is up for debate and only a persuasive argument will work.
Maybe that's the ideal. But this is the web, so much atheist rhetoric boils down to "You're not in my club, so you're a fucktard. Now, join my club, or else I'll call you a fucktard again!" That didn't work on some of us, even in grade school.
Having said that, I'll also admit having slid from a solid 2 on the Dawkins scale to roughly a 5.6 over the past couple of years, due largely to the atheists I deal with IRL having better evidence and more compelling logic than the "sophisticated" theologians (let alone the (selective) scriptural literalisits).
Oh, and a lot of Dawkins, with a bit of Stenger. BTW, I find Dawkins considerably less militant than his reputation would suggest. Either that, or I just define "militant" much too tightly.
From that link: On December 8, 2006, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings.
So, how much do we have to shake things up to make toads and turtles start freaking out?
(Yeah, I know that's from Popular Science, which phrase is an oxymoron. More's the pity.)
[...] ['Objectivism'] does go too far in the opposite direction -- that is, it essentially assumes that if communism is bad, then the exact opposite of communism must be the best way to do everything [...]
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Since there is no God to hand down morality and punish you for disagreeing everything is up for debate and only a persuasive argument will work.
Maybe that's the ideal. But this is the web, so much atheist rhetoric boils down to "You're not in my club, so you're a fucktard. Now, join my club, or else I'll call you a fucktard again!" That didn't work on some of us, even in grade school.
Having said that, I'll also admit having slid from a solid 2 on the Dawkins scale to roughly a 5.6 over the past couple of years, due largely to the atheists I deal with IRL having better evidence and more compelling logic than the "sophisticated" theologians (let alone the (selective) scriptural literalisits).
Oh, and a lot of Dawkins, with a bit of Stenger. BTW, I find Dawkins considerably less militant than his reputation would suggest. Either that, or I just define "militant" much too tightly.
Good question. I'd almost bet that the word translated as "moreover" was something much closer to "therefore".
Oh, I don't know. Maybe we'll find a way.
From that link:
On December 8, 2006, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings.
So, how much do we have to shake things up to make toads and turtles start freaking out?
(Yeah, I know that's from Popular Science, which phrase is an oxymoron. More's the pity.)
Our Lady of the Excluded Middle?
Yeah. And considering the likely consequences of failure in this application, that's got to be one hell of a confirmation bias at work.