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Have you ever noticed that people don't pray for amputees
to have their limbs grow back? Or for someone with two glass
eyes to see? Why not? They will pray for cancer to be cured,
or for pain to be reduced, or for healing but notice
something interesting. All these things will, at least
occasionally, happen anyway.
Have you even winced when told exactly what
Scientologists believe? Consider what someone from a
different religion thinks about other people's religion, each one claiming to worship the one true
God or Gods. And they believe it with all their heart, having
examples of people who have been directly affected by
prayers or other supplications to thier God.
Realize that essentially all advancements made by humanity has
come from embracing a rational approach to understanding, where ideas are tested and
those that don't work are discarded. Only
in this way do we advance useful, predictive, knowledge.
When you read about the myths of Zeus and the many Sun
Gods you think "what primitive people". Yet the
Abrahamic Gods have far more ridiculous claims that will look just as silly in a thousand
years.
Mind you, religion has contributed to knowledge by
funding discovery in the past but those days are long gone. Now it funds things like a giant
Ark, spending millions to try convincing gullible believers that
the Earth is only 6000 years old in spite of overwhelming
evidence to the contrary. The age of the earth is no
longer even an interesting question to scientists because it
has been so incredibly well validated. That is, we have
evidence from a dozen or more methods that all agree with
remarkable accuracy that the earth is over 4 billion years
old. We can see evidence every night in light that
has travelled for millions of years. Denying this obvious
fact, and getting millions of followers to deny it, is
dangerous to our goal of making good policy based on
reality. Ignoring science that's so
extraordinarily well backed up is the tip of an ignorance iceberg that threatens to sink the ship of rationality.
It's nothing short of a travesty. |