Phylosophy

[Purple Rabbit]

Daystar, you really aren't convincing anybody anymore. Drop the act. You are a religious man, you have religious beliefs. You love religion. You are devoted to your religion.

I hate religion! I hate it, I tell you! I hate religion, already!

I hate religion because it distorts the original teachings which confuses any possible meaning there might have been, and I hate religion becuase of the destruction it has caused. If you think about these reasons it is apparent that the religion itself is not the problem with me. Much like the Bible actually says that the love of money rather than money itself is the root of all evil.

Religion, like money and love and governments, are manipulated and abused, but for me the problem is that it is human nature to not pay too much attention to what is actually going on. The monsters that have abused and manipulated governments, love, money, science, and religion would not have been possible if people would pay attention to what is going on and be accountable to that.

PURPLE RABBIT!?! DID YOU HEAR THAT?!

That is why I get bent out of shape when militant Atheists are equally ignorant as Xians are. And why a similar sort of blind devotion to science frightens me.

Well, when you start shouting, it's hard to miss, Daystar.

You say you hate religion. Your stance may not be clerical doctrine but it is utterly religious. Your point is that christian believers are all stupid and interpret the bible falsely. I say you have created your own religion. And that perfectly fits the current zeitgeist. Everybody can snack his way to his own personal religion nowadays. Nothing new here. It's the religious cafetaria model and very popular among believers and new agers in my home country. For some their religion is aliens from the stars, for others it is Deepak Chopra or whichcraft, reiki, voodoo, hand reading, hot reading, cold reading, spirits, leprachauns etcetera. What all these 'thought sytems' share is the absence of verifiability and falsifiability.

The thing is that science can be misused, you are right there. But a very big, huge, enormous difference between religion and science is that the latter is open to debate and new evidence. It can be verified, it can be falsified. Everybody can challenge science and think up ways to debunk Maxwell's equations, General Relativity or the Higgs Boson. In fact, that is the road to glory in the scientific scheme. They give Nobel prizes for that. And science is gaining by it. In Newton's days, he was the man. And then Einstein came along. Not discarding all Newtonian thought about gravity as some say, but refining it for situations of high speed and strong gravitational fields. Science is growing on scepticism. So, I am all for intelligent scepticism towards scientific claims. Look at intelligent design. They've pumped millions into the programs of the Discovery Institute and Templeton Foundation. And all it does is making evolution stronger. Every claim of irreducibility gets harpooned. Because the only thing that matters in science is to have a better explanation, more predictive power with less assumptions.

Blind devotion to science? Don't make me laugh, when you have something better that I can verify I'll be happy to use it. And many scientists who on a daily basis are plowing through tons of data and many frustrating hours of non results think the same about it. Science at the moment is simply the next best thing to truth. There is no easy way to understand the world.