Yes, I see the difference. But my point is that there is no physical evidence pointing more strongly to one or the other. In another thread in the Pit mocking Tom Cruise for his beliefs, many come forth saying “I agree with his statement. Aliens might exist”, even though there is no evidence presented, only the notion that “the universe is really, really big”.
I don’t think there is that large of a difference between having faith that aliens might exist and having faith that aliens do exist. But I see your point, and it is fair enough. Still, I posit that a belief in God and a belief in aliens are both statements of faith, since neither is based in fact. If one mocks a Christian for having faith that God exists, while that same person doing the mocking also has faith that aliens may or do exist, to me that person is a hypocrite.
:smack:
There is physical evidence all right. We have physical evidence that we exist, on a planet. We have physical proof of other planets. We know that there are a lot of planets out there we haven’t been to. What result does that give us, class?
Speaking as someone who is both pro-choice and anti-death penalty, I don’t see anything remotely hypocritical about that. At first blush, it seems a lot more internally consistent than my own beliefs.
What do you mean, there’s no evidence for life on other planets? What do you call what we have on this planet? If it happened here, it could happen somewhere else, and even if the odds against it are (heh) astronomically high, there’s no end of planets where it could conceivably happen. Belief in life on other planets is entirely consistent with what we know about physics, biology, astronomy, etc. Belief in God necessarily includes belief in a being that is not bound by those rules. There’s no precedent for that in the observable universe. There is a slight amount of inferred evidence for life on other planets. There’s no evidence for an omnipresent, omnipotent supernatural creator. Which is not an argument against faith, at all, but there is a clear difference between faith and reason. I don’t much hold with making fun of religious beliefs, but that’s an entirely seperate issue from life on other planets. Doing so is not at all hypocritical, just assholish.
Pat Robertson- condemns gays and liberals as unAmerican while he’s added millions to his personal fortune by doing business with Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe and other African murderers, denounced Apartheid, condemned women who seek abortions while defending China’s “one child” policy (coincidentally he has major business interests in China), is such a craven coward he claimed he didn’t know what Falwell was talking about in his September 11 comments when it was clear he knew just what he meant and even said “I totally concur”, begs for money for African missions when in fact he has used his ministry’s aircraft to deliver mining supplies to his own interests, etc…
Bob Barr, Rena Chenoweth, Henry Hyde and all the others who created such an auto da fa over Bill Clinton’s adultery when they themselves were adulterers. (Barr was also an outspoken opponent of abortion when he’d in fact paid for his wife to have one.)
Newt Gingrich for his “Compassionate Conservative” bullshit when he served his wife with divorce papers while she was in chemotherapy and bought a fully loaded new truck while not paying child support.
Rick Santorum for using a book he admits he hasn’t read to condemn gays.
Every single homophobic politician who has ever been divorced and remarried (something Jesus himself condemned) or who doesn’t have the courage to piss off his divorced constituents by logically extending his biblical “family values”.
Judge Roy Moore of Alabama for becoming “The Ten Commandments” judge and Religious Reich posterchild when he rarely even attended church before happenstance made him world famous as a Fundie.
Sorry, but that is still faith. That is the problem with randomness. Just because we are here doesn’t mean that anybody else is out there. Six billion monkeys might type Shakespeare, too. But they might not.
Rush Limbaugh- for condemning unemployment recipients when he’s been one, for saying illegal drug users should be imprisoned when he is one (and to all of his friends like Ann Coulter who’ve said the same thing and didn’t demand his arrest), for being whiny when he’s criticized after referring to a picture of Chelsea Clinton as “White House dog”, etc.
Damned near every televangelist for crying for money when they lived in luxury.
Mother Teresa (for reasons gone into in depth on these boards)
Robert Novak for saying liberals endanger lives of servicemen when he deliberately outted a CIA operative and for ever complaining about waste of public money when he could have ended the multimillion dollar investigation into the “leak” before it started (oh, how I hope his broken hip was no mere accident but the work of a rogue spook)
To Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Stone Philips and every other person who has made comments on journalistic integrity when working so valiantly to dumb down journalism.
To Bill Cosby for being so preachy about family values when he’s a serial adulterer.
Nowhere near out of options and I haven’t even gotten to Tom Delay yet.
We have theories as to the origins of life on Earth. We know that there are billions of stars and that best likelihood is that many of them have planets. There is no reason to believe that the same incidents that created life on Earth are unique. It is not a leap of faith but a reasonable guess.
To all Christians who can see with crystal clarity the illogic in Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and all other religions but can’t see the plank in their own eye.
To the American politicians who lauded JP2 as a great “culture of life” fellow worthy of emulation but hemmed and hawed when asked why they rejected his condemntation of capital punishment.
How is at any more consistant? I’m pro-choice and anti-death lenalty as well, and to me, at frist glance, both are equally hypocritical. However, upon further analysis, I see my (and your) stance as less so, because at least in our minds, abortions are not the “killing of a young human,” but rather, the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. I don’t see abortions as killing a person, so in my mind, I’m not for the killing of one person and the saving of anther, but yet, for the pro-lifers and pro-death penatly, they are against killing of one form but not another, at least in their minds. I just don’t see how thy can justifty it to themselves, other than my argument of “well, the baby is sweet and innocent, but the murderer is evil and needs to die.”
Last time I looked, the Bible said “judge not, lest yue be judged.”
(yes yes, I nkow plenty of pro-lifers and pro-death penalty people are not CHristina, but the Christian ones seem to be the most vocale about it.)
Bill Clinton, for screwing more gays than Brian Kinney with his signature on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law and proposed by adulterers with $2 million of lobby money from a church most famous for its century of polygamous presidents).
My fave is an obscure fellow named Charles Keating. He got his start in Censornati Ohio as … a censor! and founded Citizens for Decency in Literature, later renamed Citizens for Decency through Law. He was a very pious, upstanding man, warning us all that such things as Bermuda shorts were a threat to public moraity.
He got rich as a property developer in Arizona, largely through contacts he’d made as a censorious lawyer, and then bought an S&L called Lincoln Savings and Loan, which he ran so crookedly that he wound up being one of the very few crooks to actually have to cop a plea and do some time during the S&L bailout days.
What a fucking hypocrite. “I’m moral, I dont’ like Bermuda shorts … or anything! So that means I can steal your money!”
He also boasted of the Congressmen he’d bribed and donated $1 million+ to Mother Teresa (who not only vowed what a good man he was but refused to return the money even after it was proven to be stolen). He’s portrayed by James Cromwell in The People vs. Larry Flynt (fellow Ohian Flynt was one of Keaton’s early crusades).
Similarly, knowing that life can arise (since we did), if there are enough planets in the universe, we know that the probability that life exists elsewhere approaches 1.
That has absolutely NOTHING to do with the “faith” that is required to have a belief in god.
Given an infinite amount of time, perhaps. There are a lot of planets out there, but there are not an infinite amount of planets.
That is assuming that life arose in the fashion that science currently proposes it did. Also, the probability might very well approach 1, might come within a fraction of a millimeter to 1, but there is no way of knowing that it happened anywhere else in the known or unknown universe.
I’m sorry, but I disagree. We know too little about our own origins to state with any scientific certainty that the process happened in the way we think it did, much less that the process can be duplicated elsewhere, even assuming a twin earth, twin sun, etc. Seems to me a great deal of faith is needed.
At any rate, I don’t expect total agreement. I don’t plan on debating this further, especially in a pit thread.