People who think they have to exist separately just baffle me.  I’ve never met a single Christian in my life who denied evolution.  I’ve heard about them on news shows, but I’ve never met one.  I’ve never met a single Jewish person who changed their faith based on the discovery of black holes.  I’ve never met a Buddhist who said, “One of these are correct.  Either this one is right, or this one is right, and there cannot exist a world in which someone believes in both.”

I think both of those sides who use these extreme examples as debate ammunition are unforgivably shallow.

Hardcore religious people as well as hardcore Atheists have argued extreme points publicly for so long, that it’s warped the average person’s view of what is and isn’t reasonable in a discussion like this.  Both sides preach, “Our way is the absolute letter of the law.  It is 100% correct, and any other point of view is wrong.”

Those aren’t intelligent points of discussion.  Those are the most extreme of their respective schools of thought, assuming an awful lot about their “opponents.”

So I don’t put much stock in those people’s debates.  Nothing they’re saying changes what I believe.  Nothing they’re saying erases my many, many years of education in astronomy.

The fact that we’ve reached a point in society where religious people automatically assume that atheists cannot be spiritual… and atheists assume that religious people cannot understand science… it says something pretty profound about us.  That we are all profoundly stupid.