RE: Famed biologist says religion ‘is dragging us down’ and must be eliminated
January 29, 2015 at 12:50 pm
(January 28, 2015 at 9:54 pm)Chad32 Wrote: Just keep them from positions of power, and that will probably be enough to at least make them a lot less harmful. Anyone who tries to run on "religious values" should be shut down. Keep it private. If you want to believe in gods, that's fine. Just don't force your beliefs on others, or try to use the government to convert or privilege your religion.Religion and religious influence are such a powerful political tool that I don't think you can ever separate them. It's like wanting to have the money taken out of politics-- the people who could make that happen aren't about to give up the money and the power it confers.
Or to put it another way: if religion didn't exist, we would invent it.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
