In article <47ed44c8@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> I actually found this page pretty interesting:
> 
> http://www.joethepeacock.com/2008/03/how-to-actually-talk-to-atheists-if.
php
> 
Yeah. The guy talks a lot of sense, *then* dives off the deep end by 
presuming that witnessing by example will get you any place, unless your 
example is **far** superior than, say, someone that doesn't believe in 
any of it but does more charity work, is more helpful, spends more time 
doing good, etc.

Mind you, there may be some small possibility of that being improbable, 
but more due to other factors: 1. Not *needing* to do those things to 
justify themselves, 2. Recognizing that there is a difference between 
doing good and doing what *seems* good, and 3. People that don't 
believe, may, do in part to 1 and 2, have more time to do stuff "other" 
than trying to go around making themselves look good, to witness for 
their position.

Besides, its also rather unclear how showing that your church, following 
one of hundreds of thousands of variations in rules, can be good people 
and do good things, somehow leads to the main premise they would like it 
to.

In other words, while 90% of the stuff on the page is quite true, the 
other 10% represents assumptions that do not logically follow from 
either his own position, or any presumption that might be made about how 
that action would be interpreted *by* the people they want to talk to 
about it. Its still presuming that there is some core difference between 
"their" acts of charity and virtue, and others, and that this should be 
so obvious to anyone, that witness by action would mean anything at all, 
other than, "Well, yeah, you manage to be a good person, despite the 
*reason(s)* you have for doing so, but how does that prove that it was 
in any way related to what you believe in?" Oops!

Anyway, PZ, or someone in one in the comments section, once posted the 
link to that page before, and we had a fairly interesting discussion of 
both why people that would act that way wouldn't bug us quite as badly 
as those that don't, as well as why their where serious disconnects 
between the action proposed and the outcome they thought would naturally 
derive from it (not the least being that you would have to shred the 
Bible and invent a whole new religion, to make such behavior *not* 
contradict most existing religion's own writings).

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

Post a reply to this message