FIREBLIND.COM

For the first time in my illustrious career as the 4th most highly paid employee at fireblind.com, I’m going to steal someone else’s post. Actually, I’m not technically stealing, since I’m giving you links to the source over and over, but I am reprinting the entire thing without the author’s (Joseph Meert) permission. The fact that the guy hasn’t updated in a year makes me nervous that his stuff might go away. So, I want to make sure the post survives into posterity, as I think it’s brilliant. So without further ado, “Is Science a Religion?”

Science explores the natural world and makes predictions, retrodictions and constantly tries to falsify itself. Very few religions make daily attempts to falsify themselves. Very few religions (certainly not Christianity or Islam) spend day after day trying to refute the very fundamental tenets of their beliefs. If we use Christianity as an example, Christians accept on faith that God is a holy trinity and that one of the godhead came to earth as man, died as a man and rose again as a god. That tenet is not tested, it is not testable and it is not science. When most people say that ’science is religion’ most of the time they are speaking of evolutionary biology. In extreme cases it means everything from geology to chemistry to physics, but I find that extremists generally don’t understand geology, chemistry and physics. Instead they view those sciences as supporting evolution, and they then reject them as religious.

What I find particularly odd is that the assertion ’science is religion’ is actually used in the pejorative. It’s not elevating science, it is denigrating science. That we all know, but how many of use pay equal attention to the fact that when calling ‘evolution a religion’, they are also denigrating their religion. The mocking tones are really saying ‘evolution is stoopid’ (to paraphrase inmate Kent Hovind). But if evolution is a religion and it’s stupid, then aren’t Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism etc all ’stoopid’ as well? In calling science a religion, creationists are shooting themselves in the foot. Read these two sentences and tell me which one is more likely to be defended by a creationist.

(1) If science is a religion, then why should I believe evolution?
(2) If Christianity is a religion, then why should I believe Christ rose from the dead?

They will try to separate these two statements and convince you that you should believe in Christ even though it is a religion and should not buy into evolution because it is a religion.

And again, here’s that link: http://scienceantiscience.blogspot.com/2007/07/is-science-religion.html

After lurking for a while, I decided to dive in to the Religion and Spirituality section of the Yahoo Answers website. A few of the questions are pretty good, but most of them are not really questions or are intended to raise the ire of a particular group.

I came across a “question” today, in which a young woman beseeches people to pray for her sister, who is going to church for the first time tonight. Ostensibly, the holy spirit will come into her “heart” and her sister will be saved.

Basically, she’s asking people to send telepathic messages to an all-powerful, invisible god in the hope that said god will change his mind about this girl’s path, send an invisible messenger into her body, and rearrange her invisible soul such that she now believes that the same invisible god sent part of himself to earth in human form only to let himself be killed, and then to resurrect himself three days later as penance for original sin committed 6,000 years ago by a man and woman swindled by a talking snake.

Christian theology basically teaches us that right now, standing next to us are invisible angels and demons fighting over our very souls. I’m wondering what they’re doing, exactly. Do both of them have their hands inside of my brain, actively rearranging neurons that control my emotions and feelings about god? Is my soul a tough guy, able to fend for himself against ninja demons? If I’m in a saloon, is there a spiritual, parallel saloon where the angels and demons are like throwing each other through the plate glass window, or sliding the kind of nerdy angel down the bar until he hits the angel barkeep who is innocently standing at the end?

Why should someone have to “believe” anyway, as if a leap of faith is good measure of human focus. Is god so worried about his deposit on the place that he has to throw humans into everlasting torment because we leave a few beer cans on the floor? I can’t think of a stupider and more needlessly complicated way for a creation to have gone south, and for a supposedly all-powerful god to let man redeem himself. If god were a contestant on the Gong-Show, he would have been the first jackass out of the joint.