Fuck you.
In a recent speech, you equated atheism with Nazism. I am not a Nazi and the two concepts have nothing to do with each other.Yes, we live in an age where religion is quickly dying out. In the past, religion served to 'fill in the gaps' of human knowledge. Whenever science has come along to fill those gaps with the truth, those clinging to their religious beliefs stop the progress of science, and for many centuries, religion has held back the human race and our progression forward.Today we live in an era dominated by science and technology; new discoveries are being made every day, and we know more about the universe and it's workings than anyone in history. This is a scary thing for religion, because it's purpose of 'filling in the gaps' is quickly becoming vestigial. It is, of course, no wonder that a large number of religious bodies are aggressively fighting against this new era of humanity, and it's not surprising to watch them go to such ridiculous extremes as to make comparisons with Hitler and Nazism. Pathetic, really.But for calling me a Nazi: Fuck you.
Lapixx - Why are we here? Because we evolved by random chance. There is no greater purpose, except what we make for ourselves.
Religion exists for people who can't give themselves a purpose in life, people who need or want someone else to tell them what that purpose should be. The reality is that life is what you make of it. You can choose to feel worthless, nothing more than a random occurrence in the universe… Or you can work towards making something great of yourself and humanity.This is why I firmly believe in a focus on space exploration, and eventually the colonization of solar system bodies and onward to the stars, the search for other life out there, and so on. To ensure the survival of our species on large time scales. That's my purpose, to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge so that this may one day become a reality, before we kill ourselves on this earth because 'god told us to.'Religion is not fighting the expansion of discovery and technology. I have been a devout Christian my whole life, and I am also very interested in science. I'm not alone, either, there are many Christian scientists. There is nothing in the bible that says technology is evil; there is no passage that says exploring God's world and figuring out how it all works is a sin. It's not a case of science vs. the church, as some would like to have it painted. For the record, Christianity has not been proven wrong. True, it cannot be definitively proven through science, but there IS evidence of past events spoken of in the bible, just as there are inconclusive scraps of evidence regarding evolution, and the big bang. These are scientific theories, and the theory I subscribe to is creationism.
Nighthawk, the conflicts arise when Science explains something that Religion has explained differently. Examples include the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun and Evolution. The latter took hundreds of years to find acceptance, and evolution, if ever accepted (it sort of conflicts with nearly all creation fables) will take just as long if not longer.
And yeah, Christianity can't be proven wrong, congratulations for pointing out that. It can't be proven right either, and it can be easily demonstrated that out of the uncountably infinite number of possibilities for how the universe 'really is,' there is absolutely nothing to indicate that Christianity is the 'one true religion' beyond the fact that you happened to be born and raised, indoctrinated under it's teachings.Furthermore: creationism is not a theory, please stop butchering scientific terminology to try and give credence to your unscientific beliefs. A 'Theory,' in Science, is just one step below a 'Law.' It's something that has been demonstrated thousands of times by repeatable experimentation and/or has mountains of backing evidence. Creationism (along with "Intelligent Design") is a hypothesis, and a poor one at that.While the distinct evolution of every species on earth hasn't been proven, evolution itself is fact and is certainly convincing. It follows logic. It has been proven that genetic mutations occur. It has also been proven that organisms reproduce and inherit the genes of their parents. Common sense tells us those that survive live to reproduce.
I think it is plausible to claim that evolution is an intelligent design, but not the species which evolve from others themselves. There is physical evidence of evolution (more than just skeletons), whilst by its own definition intelligent design cannot be observed, and therefore the probability of its existence is (at least) as unlikely as every other theory concerning our own creation. Biblical miracles could be observed but none have been, so that proves nothing.So to answer your question Nighthawk, I see Intelligent Design as a poor hypothesis because it is only one in a universe of equally poor hypotheses, not equally good hypotheses."Faith" is irrational because the belief in something infinitely unlikely acts only as an insurance bet - but only if you're not aware of that, because religion usually forbids itself from being an insurance bet. I don't want to imply that belief in a specific form of religion is ignorant, but that's certainly the conclusion I just came to.(Oops) Well, humans don't have a perfect ability to evaluate those proofs anyway.