I posted this in another thread, just as an OT aside:
Obviously this poster on another message board believes that God created the earth, and the implication in his penultimate sentence is that he’s a Young Earth Creationist.
It seems to me that the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, et al are pretty good advice for living life. The rituals of religions seem a good way to bring people together and to remind them of the teachings. If people are compassionate, they don’t go around stealing and killing, and if they treat other people well it’s all good. If they want to believe in a god or gods, that’s up to them.
But why must a vocal subset of religious people deny hard evidence? The Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth, which it clearly doesn’t. I doubt any YECs or other anti-science types believe otherwise. But when they come up against other things that are in the Bible that can be shown through observation and empirical evidence, they deny it. If I drop a hammer, it will fall. I don’t have to ‘believe’ it will fall. It will whether I believe it or not. If I know that positive electrons flow to the negative pole, and that when passed through a filament on the way the filament becomes hot and emits light, I don’t have to ‘believe’ it. I can see it. If I find an ammonite in a desert rock, I can conclude that there was water in a place that is now dry and that it took some amount of time for the sediments to be laid down and for the land to be uplifted and for the water to go away and for the mud to turn into rock. And yet observations and experimentations and artifacts are called ‘belief’ instead of ‘evidence’ because they contradict things in a book that’s internally contradictory.
Why is it so difficult for people to believe in a supernatural being or beings and accept evidence they can hold in their hands?