Re: [asa] another coyne attack

A much more reasoned and reasonable counterpoise is given in Comment #2 in
response to Coyne's blog post. It is from someone who describes himself as
an agnostic. He says (among quite a long response well worth reading):

----
Once a Christian or Muslim says—”I accept that the earth is old and that
plants and animals have changed over time”—I can have a reasonable
conversation with them.
And I don’t think that the Christian or Muslim who says—”I accept evolution,
but I think there is a God or Mind that started the whole Big Bang thing
going”—is saying anything especially irrational.
----
The first sentence resonates for me.  I have many reasonable conversations
with a close colleague who is an atheist, because we are both approaching it
from a common position as regards science.
By contrast, another colleage, who is a fundamentalist Christian and
creationist, just attacked my atheist colleague viciously and told him
"don't you know it's a sin to disbelieve?"  It clearly wasn't a reasonable
thing to say, because, as Jonathan pointed out, he doesn't believe in God so
the word "sin" doesn't really have the same meaning for him.
Hate to say this ... but the fundamentalist Xian colleague is an American
;-)  Maybe there's a difference between American and British psyche that
means his kind of bulldozer approach (not dissimilar to Coyne's) works on
Americans.  It doesn't work on British people who just tend to get pissed
off by it.
Iain
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:34 AM, George Murphy <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com> wrote:
>  Coyne has a new attack on Biologos for promoting Denis Lamoureux's new
> book -
> http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/biologos-foundations-suggested-reading/#comments .
> It reeks of fanaticism.
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm<http://home.roadrunner.com/%7Escitheologyglm>
>
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