Letters to the Editor
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We are working...
Everybody get back to WORK! Stop thinking!
Ah, Ok Wilson, if someone calls themselves an evolutionist, you wouldn't say they had a 'belief system' would you? Or someone says they are an 'environmentalist" you wouldn't say they had a belief system, would you? Well, maybe you would. How about the 'belief' in gravity. Atheists call themselves that not because they have a belief alone, but because their investigation of the world, and others' investigations (science), have lead them to conclude there is (probably) no God.
As a prior post pointed out, if you could prove it scientifically, us Atheists would be on board. So we actually are talking about belief in science. I am also an environmentalist, an evolutionist and a believer in gravity, though I know they could all be disproved someday.
Are we 'polarizing' the debate? Well, between two poles there is a very large continuum, as we all know, and everyone places themselves on it somewhere. What you are hinting at is that the fundies should have no 'pole' of opposite and equal attraction. I.E. you are a centrist arguing, actually, that the fundies provide the only pole.
As we all know in dialectics (we do, don't we?) thesis and anti-thesis produce a new "synthesis." That is why Atheists don't mind being a pole, to move the folks in the middle perhaps a nudge over, and create a new American 'synthesis' of religion. And we are, as prior posts have pointed out, having an effect. Look at Europe, your future, Wilson, where religion is more and more the province of history and ... Muslims.