Hey Korinthian since you’ll obviously be posting on this thread anyway, can I ask you: What’s your background, education-wise?

Yeah, wartoaster, I’m sure if we tracked down every last staving peasant and tribe and convinced them that Newtonian Gravity was legit while explaining it at a level an illiterate person could understand, the world would finally know peace.

Religion is an intrinsic aspect of culture, and if it doesn’t reflect objective truth, it reflects a culture’s subjective truths, values, collective way of thinking and so forth. It’s a simple fact that the vast majority of religious beliefs in any literate culture don’t come from scripture. Try to find a description of the Catholic or Anglican rites in a Bible.

As more and more people in the West reject Christianity, they simply take all the cultural information which is encoded in, but not depended on, religion, and cross out the parts that say “God” and “Jesus” and write in science.

In the last decade, I’ve seen science literally deified. People speak of science in the exact same way they speak of the Holy See or the Scriptures. Scientific truths are now considered eternal, unquestionable truths – even if those truths come from notoriously liquid “soft” sciences such as Psychology. Science is considered a sort of organized thing of which the believers are members, and must act a certain way: despite not being a scientist, I’ve been cast repeatedly on the ‘them’ side of the “us and them” debate many times, despite not being religious myself. And now, science is being proposed as a solution of all of life’s problems.

Listen. I understand a simplified layman’s version of Newtonian Gravity. If I went to my boss and said “Hey, I have a basic understanding of gravity. I’m not doing any work and BTW pay me.” He’d laugh. If I went to the Prime Minister and said “I sort of understand Newtonian Gravity, pull the troops out of Afghanistan” I’d probably be arrested. If I went to the UN and said “I understand a little bit of Newtonian gravity. Solve world hunger.” I would expect someone to punch me.

Every aspect of what is mainly Abrahamic cultural miscellanea has now been successfully transposed onto science. I can only imagine this weakens science – which has traditionally been an open and cynical process – but maybe not.

My point? Atheism doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes you more confident that your opinions are objective when, in fact, they are bullshit. So ostensibly it just makes people equally stupid as religion does. Unless you:

a) are a pHd in some kind of hard science
b) you can actually convince me that people believing in fucking Newtonian Gravity without understanding the nitty-gritty of it will solve world hunger or war or any other political or economic problem

Please do me a favour and shut your cunt mouth, because hearing someone like you, wartoast, talk, is no different to me than hearing Jerry Falwell or George Bush or Billy Graham or any other overly-confident self-important blowhard blab on about how awesome they are.

Also,

“Hey Korinthian since you’ll obviously be posting on this thread…” – me

“Just to beat you geniuses to the punch: tl;dr” – me

“wall of text” – Korinthian

I fucking called it. I fucking double-called it.

If there weren’t wars in the name of God, there would be wars in the name of some other random -ism. Take a look at the massive three way between Cambodia, Vietnam and China in the late 70s. It went only a few years, but the death tolls are at least in the millions, probably the ten millions.

What causes wars is thinking your position is absolutely correct without seriously considering evidence, conflicting viewponts, or your own fallibility. Confirmation Bias has caused more wars than any particular religion.