Reply #95: I thought it was clear

[Yo_Mama]

I do believe that safeguarding individuals' ability to choose is imperative for religious reasons.

The OP questions were about the readers' religious beliefs, but to be honest I believe that safeguarding indivduals' ability to choose their own life patterns is essential for democracy to function. Democracies are inherently pretty inefficient politically; their advantage lies in the experimental aspects involved in personal freedom, choices, their real world consequences and representative government. A democracy may take 100 wrong paths, but it has the ability to find better ways based on experience and real-world consequences.

I believe in evolution, because it seems amply demonstrated. (Although since I was a kid, it appears more and more likely that the pan-Spermian theory may be correct - life on this planet may have been jump-started from microbial life on others. When I was kid, that seemed like a really whacky theory which was presented to us only briefly in sort of a historical footnote, but since then, the dates of relatively complex life have been pushed back so far that now it is more mathematically plausible than the alternative, plus we seem to have strong hints that microbial life is found in asteroids.)

Therefore obviously I would not like evolution not to be taught. However because science itself works on public debate, I don't really have a problem with creationism being presented to public school students, or any students, as long as it is presented as a competing theory. If anything, I think the comparison between the evidence would lead anyone to a belief in evolution.

Science should not be taught or presented as a belief system - it destroys the underlying basic of science. At most, there are a very few axioms in scientific method, and those extremely basic, such as the idea that the natural world follows rules, that those rules can be derived from observation and experiment, the ability to form predictive hypotheses, etc. All the other things we know or think we know are derived from observations.

I am from Georgia. I certainly am exposed to a lot of fundamentalists and I do not seem to ever find the vast hordes of shrieking fundamentalists that so many describe.

I believe in equal civil rights for homosexuals and gender-blurred individuals.