Look, Daddy. That's a church.Mac and I smiled at each other as we drove on - that special smile parents share when their young children say such wonderfully daft things. I spent some time with No 1 Son thereafter, putting him straight on the Jesus story. But still, what he said was funny.
Yes. Yes it is a church.
Jesus lives there.
Does he?
Yes.
Oh. Okay.
Jesus kills people.
Does he!?
Yes, look [pointing to the churchyard] that's where he buries the bodies.
However, it's not funny when an adult says something equally as daft. This from Ctl at Dean's World:-
Of course science leads you to killing people. It’s generally not scientists who do the killing, of course. As a group, scientists (being academics) are probably among the most physically cowardly of our species, and are therefore among the most gentle. While it’s true that politicians who start wars rarely themselves fire shots in anger in those wars, science doesn’t generally lead to killing in a direct manner, such as by proposing a theory that someone needs to die.Here's an example Ctl gives of how science kills people:-
Science leads you to killing people because the scientific method is inherently amoral (note: amoral, not immoral).
The danger is that when the nanotech researcher gives a lecture that religion shouldn’t get in the way of his research, a less gentle man might attend and conclude that the same principle means that religion shouldn’t get in the way of his being a murdering dictator.Where do you start in responding to this sort of thing? I'm going to go ask one of the boys, I'm sure they have to deal with ideas like this in the playground every day.
The researcher who gave the lecture will complain that he never meant that, and that the dictator is abusing what he said. But the abuse is only in the trivial sense that the dictator is correctly applying the principles that the scientist expounded towards a goal which the scientist doesn’t want him to.
