HOT TOPIC REPOSTED BY POPULAR DEMAND
Not sure, but I don’t think the Brit author of this piece likes these guys.
The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it
It’s an extraordinary publishing phenomenon – atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett’s success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Last week, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.
[…]Surely not since Victorian times has there been such a passionate, sustained debate about religious belief.
And it’s a very ill-tempered debate. The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief – they want it eradicated (although they differ as to the chances of achieving that). The newcomer on the block, Hitchens, sums up monotheism as “a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events”.
The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking […] Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed – the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date?
#59 Misanthropic Scott
Your reply, to my post #49, you seem to be making a counter point to my “no real point” how does that work?
Hum, how does this work, regarding your blatantly unsubstantiated and implausible assumption “The big difference is that atheists have done so in the name of some other ideology.”? With what certainty did you determine the name of this other ideology in each case??
Lastly regarding “your post is pretty asinine”, I’ll take that as a compliment! Please can I have another?
Next, #62 Mr. Fusion
Maybe it’s just me, but your quote “First, neither actually killed people with the exception of during the revolutions. Most leaders seldom get their hands dirty.” is a difference with no legal or moral significance!
Next #65 JimR
I think it very safe to say, your “wise anon” and his/her/it saying “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby”
has no wide standing or relevance. I’ll leave it, that in your mind you believe this very strongly.
So do I u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d this “I believe that I don’t believe” thing of yours, sorry Ich verstehen nicht!
So on the whole, #59, #62, #65 your auguments posited are necessarily circular, self referencing and attempting to be impenetrable and thereby blatantly bogus and unconvincing! IMHO
If I believed that there was a god.. pulling the strings..
what would be my next course of action..
do a bunch of good and die doing something risky while i’m ahead of the proverbial good/bad curve, on the good side?
i know it’s not a points system
If I believe there is no god (sorry spaghetti monster) pulling the strings
what would be my..
do a bunch of good and die doing something not so risky while i’m ahead of the proverbial good/bad curve, on the good side?
it seems to me, that, no matter what you think.. you better think for yourself or get back to church and stop thinking for yourself
cause you just can’t handle the truth
we can either physically fight to the death or verbally fight to altruism
i don’t care which.. as long as i get to watch
Altuism..
We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service…. This [“to live for others”], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” As the name of the ethical doctrine is “altruism,” doing what the ethical doctrine prescribes has also come to be referred to by the term “altruism” — serving others through placing their interests above one’s own.
from da wiki
#96 erm..
Altruism is what i meant to define in my last post ..
stolen and un-error corrected
#95 Chirs Mac
I would rather there be a “spaghetti monster” food fight myself.
See how they run from the toss of “meatballs of death”
or quiver after being roped with the “noddle lasso of truth”
or cover from being spewed with “spaghetti sauce pollutants”
or cringe from the thunder of stale baguettes?
#94
> I think it very safe to say, your “wise anon” and
> his/her/it saying “Atheism is a religion like not
> collecting stamps is a hobby” has no wide standing or
> relevance. I’ll leave it, that in your mind you believe
> this very strongly.
Frankly, this is the reponse of a person entirely unable to come to grips with the idea that there are people with no belief in the supernatural (whatever that is) and thus must invent the idea that this lack of belief is itself a belief. Atheism is the lack of a belief in the supernatural. Thus, claiming that the lack of belief or acceptance of something is itself something a belief is ridiculous and entirely illogical. Having insufficient evidence to support a hypothesis in no way substantiates the antithesis of that hypothesis.
If I state that I do not accept the existence of leprechauns, that is not itself a belief. That simply means that I have been provided insufficient evidence to support the claim. If I state that I do not believe that leprechauns exist because there is no evidence, that too is not itself a belief but a lack of belief.
#99 Thomas
I am not sure where you get your concept of belief or what support you have to sustain, that; belief necessitates a conveyance or equivalence of the supper natural.
Belief is just any cognitive content held as true. The cognitive content my indeed reflect a physical, repeatable and independently verifiable reality or it may not, it still is a belief.
Why are you trying so dubiously hard to contort a concept to fit your agenda??
#100: now we’re talking about ambiguity of words.
Belief, unlike believe, I believe is soaked with religious connotations in English as much as it is in German (which happens to be my 1st language). The noun “Belief” is usually reserved for a very specific way of believing: believing a religious teaching despite the lack of proof or evidence. Indeed, a “firm belief” in the face of difficulties or even evidence that the belief might be worng is generally applauded in religious circles.
The verb “to believe” is much more secular. It’s non-dogmatic. It’s either a hypothetical thought or a matter of trust towards another person.
When we are faced with evidence undermining what we believe, it’s usually regarded as a good procedure to re-evaluate what we were believing. If it was a religious belief, that’s totally different.
You can, of course, use your rethoric freedom and use the word “Belief” for a thought believed to be true by someone at a given time. The hypothesis of a scientific person is that the world has evolved to what it is today without the need of any spiritual being. He believes that is true because a) there’s a pretty solid working model for many of the processes involved and evidence supporting them and b) there’s no evidence for divine intervention. This is the secular meaning of the word “to believe”. Now you substitute that with the religious meaning and boom, you’ve made science a belif! At least rethorically. But that doesn’t make it any more true.
Now, I can only see two explanations here: either you’re not smart enough to see the difference between the secular meaning of “to belive something” and the religious “Belief”, or you know the difference but decide to ignore it because it better suits your agenda.
What do you say?
pj
we need to come up with a good law for spelling errors
otherwise i wanna free dinner of supper natural
i will never have a blog because there is no god other than you
and because you dun deserve it
trroll
k.. i’ll stfu
if mr torvalds or wosniak could please stand up
about the appendix. If a purpose is found for it, it does not challenge the fundamentals of evolution, which merely state that current species have evolved from earlier species.
Practice for surgeons?
J/P=?
#106: actually, “purpose” has no meaning in evolution. The word purpose implies that something is there “for” something.
In evolutionary terms, nothing has a purpose but everything has adapted to be useful.
There is a multitude of things that have initially served one purpose and over evolutionary times has changed to adapt to a different or additional use. Feathers, often used by creationists as one of those things that could never have evolved because they’re so well suited for their “purpose” are a great exaple for just this: change and change of use.
Newer science has evidence that many of the dinosaurs actually had feathers, despite the fact that they were pretty badly shaped for flight. It’s thought that feathers kept them warm, helped to isolate the body. That’s something feathers do well, after all, pillows were stuffed with feathers for centuries and still are, for just that reason. However, just like the dinosaurs, the pillows don’t fly.
Only later, when some smaller Dinosaurs started gliding down from trees or from tree to tree, there was some difference between them, some would glide farther than others, thus they were less likely to plummet onto the ground rather than reaching the next tree. On the ground, they were more likely to fall prey to whatever it is that made them decide to live in the trees in the first place.
As a result, the variation in the group that made the difference in distance of glide became a variable of evolutionary preassure, selecting for better glide angles. Turns out that certain shapes of feathers would improve the glide distance.
Those feathers didn’t have the “purpose” to allow flight, they were just better at it than others.
The “purpose” is also the point where so many theist arguments fall short in other cases. Often, you can hear them say how well suited the earth is to carry life. How it could be a totally different planet, hostile to life, with no oxygen and sunlight and how the temperatures are just in the range that is acceptible to life as we know it.
Well, it’s not that the earth was here with the purpose to support life.
Life has evolved in the bounds that the earth defines. Out of all the billion planets in the universe, life has probably come up quite a few times and everywhere it has adapted to the local circumstances. There’s life-forms that are independent of oxygen (actually, all early life on earth was independent of oxygen, oxygen is pretty deadly to many archaic bacteria). On earth, we don’t know any life form that would be independent of Carbon, but that might just be coincidence. Carbon is a chemically very flexible element, but so is silicon.
What I’m saying is: don’t let the word “purpose” slip in too often when you talk about evolution. Nothing is on purpose and most things don’t serve a purpose, they have just adapted to the needs in order to survive in their respective environment. Also, they have adapted on the basis of what was available. One of the limitations of evolution is, that it has no foresight. It cannot accept a path towards a better adaptation if there’s no continuous slope upwards. That continuous slope might be hideously difficult and time consuming, but it’s necessary. Single islands of optimum adaptations cannot be reached by an evolutionary process if they’re surrounded by a “ditch”.
pj
[read: Dawkins, climbing mount improbable]
#74 – Bruce IV,
He just is?
But, if you can believe that, why do you have trouble with ‘the universe just is’? Or, ‘the big bang just happened’? The universe exists. We all truly experience it in a way that no one has experienced god. And, yes, my point is that quantum mechanics does indeed allow for the spontaneous creation of matter with no proximate cause.
But, god is a complex entity. He/she/it cannot just pop out of the quantum soup in the same way. He/she/it is not just a bunch of quarks, leptons, and gluons. He/she/it would require a real explanation in the way that subatomic particle creation does not.
I’d probably suggest that if you do not see the difference, you might want to read a book by Leonard Susskind called The Cosmic Landscape. It may be a bit more difficult to a general audience than Dawkins and the like, especially if you have not read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. But, it’s really worth it. Here’s a link.
http://www.bestwebbuys.com/9780316013338
#85 – Bruce IV,
I can’t explain how that is logically impossible. I can only explain how it would not explain anything, even if true. It would ask more questions than it answers. Instead of a huge bizarre inexplicable universe about which to probe and seek real answers, we now have this god thing running around with the ability to create whole universes left and right. How the hell are we going to explain that thing??!!? Especially when one of its very tenets is ‘do not question me’! This to me is beyond absurd. Why would god give us a brain and not want us to ask questions? Why is it that only people who do not believe can ask such questions? If I actually believed in this god creature, I’d want to know more about it. I’d be asking lots of questions. But, religion seems to disapprove of all such questions. What a silly concept!!
#81 – Bruce IV (again)
This is not mathematics. This is not starting from a hypothesis. This is looking at the stuff in our universe and trying to explain it. It is not the other way around. We start with stuff we observe. Since we do not observe god, we do not start there. Simple. When a single shred of evidence for something like dark matter or dark energy is found, we begin to investigate it. When a single shred of evidence for god is found, we will begin to investigate that. At present, there is no shred of evidence for god. So, we do not investigate that.
Got it? (No. You don’t. You probably won’t. But, it really is simple.)
#93 – Billy Bob,
I’m struck by the lack of tolerance displayed by someone who blames religion for all of the intolerance in the world.
Perhaps if the religious weren’t trying to legislate that I must believe in god, I would be more tolerant of religion. But, when ‘In God We Trust’ is on every dollar I spend and ‘God Bless America’ is shoved in my face everywhere I go and people try to teach this crap in public school, I have no choice but to become intolerant.
When people justify killing doctors, bombing clinics, obstructing access to health care for women, etc., I have no choice but to become intolerant.
In short, stop proselytizing, stop legislating from religion, and stop killing in the name of religion, and I’ll become more tolerant.
God blessed America on 9/11/2001. Now, let’s all just hope he/she/it leaves us the hell alone for a while.
#94 – noname,
Give me an example of an atheist who murdered to spread atheism. That is what I meant. Stalin did not kill to spread atheism. Nor did the others on your list. Many have killed to spread their particular flavor of religion. Do you see that difference?
#101 – Peter Jakobs,
Good point about purpose. I think though that the type of purpose you talk about should actually be capitalized. It is true that there is no great Purpose for the heart. But, I think that its existence was shaped by natural selection and can be seen as having the smaller purpose of pumping blood. It’s just a useful way to talk about things. But, you’re correct, it may sound like there was some engineer. If so, said engineer was merely the blind watchmaker of natural selection. Creatures with a heart to pump blood had a survival advantage.
#101 Peter Jakobs
What do I say? All that you have succeeded with is
1.) Telling me what you believe, which is irrelevant for this discussion.
“Belief, unlike believe, I believe”
2.) Unconvincingly and unsuccessfully assert the verb “to believe” is much more secular. Trying to differentiate a word if it is secular or not, if the word is a verb or not, is really new to english. However; I am sure it’s not new in how your mind.
http://www.answers.com/topic/belief
http://www.answers.com/topic/believe
A given example::
Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
I am sure you will read religion into that example, when it doesn’t necessitate for it.
#108 Misanthropic Scott
Do you see that difference? Simply, No.
They where atheist and they were mass murders. What ever their motives for mass murder doesn’t change, they were atheist nor excuse they murdered on a historically massive scale.
Your attempt to separate they where atheist and that they were mass murders is truly making a difference with out meaning.
Meanwhile I would like to get back to my regularly scheduled “spaghetti monster” food fight.
Run ye from my toss of “meatballs of death”
Quiver all after being roped with the “noddle lasso of truth”
Cover thy selves from being spewed with “spaghetti sauce pollutants”
or cringe from the thunder of the stale baguettes!
For the spaghetti monster cometh in thy hunger pangs of the night.
#100
If lack of a belief is itself a belief system then m’friend we belong to an infinite number of relgions:
The religion that does not believe in Thor
The religion that does not believe in Freya
…
The religion that does not believe in Zeus
The religion that does not believe in Apollo
…
The religion that does not believe in Sheba
…
The religion that does not believe in leprechauns
..
The religion that does not believe in pink fairies
The religion that does not believe in blue fairies
…
The religion that does not believe that the lint in my pocket is a god
The religion that does not believe in Puff the Magic Dragon
…
If what we don’t believe is itself a belief system, then by that recokening all of the above should be recognizable religions.
> Belief is just any cognitive content held as true.
Yes, but it is *not* the lack of said conviction that something is true.
>I have no choice but to become intolerant.
That would make a good signature quote. So, basically everyone else needs to conform to your atheist religious views, stop proslytizing (i.e. non-conforming views should be silenced), etc. Such anti-religious fervor!
Btw, communists from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot killed priests to suppress religion. They weren’t too picky in terms of targeting particular sects. If you want to debate the half-empty, half-full semantic of whether suppressing religion is the same as promoting atheism I’ll leave you to that.
I realize I’m rather late to the party, so let me first offer my, as that starry chelloveck Alex DeLarge says, ‘appy-polly-loggies.’
• • • • • • • •
#74 – Bruce IV
“As for the hobbits, ect. well, I have heard no credible evidence of them. I have personal experience of God, and have heard the same from people I trust. It cannot be scientifically proved, and others, such as yourself, can propose other rational explanations for that experience – which also are unproveable. I choose to keep the view I have.”
It may seem like nitpicking, but it truly isn’t. Your misspelling of ‘etc’ is more than just that. It’s a common error, but it’s always, in my experience, a red flag which signals an important lack of precision in the utterer’s thought processes.
FYI – there is no “eck” involved. It is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase ‘et cetera’. ‘Et’ means ‘and’, ‘cetera’ means ‘other things. Over time, with frequent usage it came to be abbreviated ‘et c.’ and also ‘& c’, eventually reaching its present forms, ‘etc.’ and ‘&c’. People who, like yourself, don’t bother to investigate unfamiliar words and phrases to find out what is correct simply repeat what they hear from others in their peer group – who are equally unfussy about pronunciation and spelling – the corruption “eck cetera” – and then abbreviate it (despite it being spelled correctly everywhere one bothers to look) “ect.”
It is an error that in my experience is never committed by persons with any formal education in the sciences, who must learn certain basic Latin forms and usages in order to achieve functional fluency in scientific discourse. So when you use “ect” you’re clearly announcing your scientific illiteracy to the world. It’s use also proclaims that you fail to recognize the importance and the need for precise and accurate thought and expression. That you make an error so easily avoided, and so fundamental, shows that your reasoning on more complex matters is just as likely to exhibit important errors arising from sloppiness.
It’s a sort of intellectual litmus test, and it’s proven to be highly reliable.
IOW, if you can’t be bothered to get something so simple and basic correct, you obviously don’t reason well – and don’t recognize the importance of doing so.
Let’s see what you bring to the table here;
“As for the hobbits, ect. well, I have heard no credible evidence of them.”
OK so far, perfectly reasonable…
“I have personal experience of God, and have heard the same from people I trust.”
And here we blithely tap-dance into the minefield of illogic.
Let me ask you this first, then we can proceed with evaluating your assertions, OK?
What, exactly, was the nature of your “personal experience’? Did you see something? Hear something? Which of your senses were involved? Please elaborate.
We’ll leave the related but seperate issue of your ‘trusted’ secondhand testimony aside for now…
#85 – @75 – please explain how this is logically impossible – God is outside of the physical world, of which time is a part – without time, there is no necessity for a beginning or end. Just because your logic can’t incorporate something doesn’t make it false – I’m sure there were plenty of “logical” arguments that the earth is flat and heavy things fall faster.
This is why we don’t really like the debate… It inevitable boils down to smart vs. dumb.
But I’ll humor you. I can prove there is no God, but to do so we need to go somewhere. We need to go to “outside the physical world”.
You drive.
#94 – I think it very safe to say, your “wise anon” and his/her/it saying “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby”
has no wide standing or relevance. I’ll leave it, that in your mind you believe this very strongly.
Well then you are simply ignorant of the common language we all speak. Words don’t mean the things you want them to so that your points will be validated. Words mean exactly what they mean, and atheism is not a religion by definition.
And its absolutely relevant as it lies at the heart of many of the (dubious) points being made by theists around here.
Ever wonder why God didn’t want you humans to eat from the tree of knowledge???? ET
#111 – That would make a good signature quote. So, basically everyone else needs to conform to your atheist religious views, stop proslytizing (i.e. non-conforming views should be silenced), etc. Such anti-religious fervor!
No… No one needs to conform with anyone’s views… They just need to quit interferring with ours. Take your GOD DAMNED nose out of our lives. You’re presence in the community is tolerated. Your presence in our personal lives is not.
NOTE: My dear normal Christian friends. I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to your ill-mannered in-bred redneck cousins over at The 700 Club and the Old Time Gospel Hour. The Bible beating, self righteous pricks who can’t ask you to pass the salt without praising the lord and who can’t go to a voting booth with denying the rest of us our basic human rights.
There is nothing more absurd than this bizarre Xian mantra we are hearing so much of these days…
Oh my… We poor Chistians are being persecuted by the mean mean atheists.
Blow me. And quit blocking the vaccination of teenage girls against HPV in Texas you ignorant fucks.
How persecuted can you be when you a few multi-million dollar media networks and one of your own is President of the United States. Quit boo-wooing about how you are being treated and quit claiming that we want to round you up and put you in gas chambers… The last guy that did that was a Christian.
Just quit trying to deny gay people the same rights that you have. Quit trying to infect our schools with magic lessons in place of science. Quit trying to impose your value systems in our lives.
If you wonder why we speak to you this way, it is because WE ARE DEFENDING OURSELVES FROM YOU.
@108 – I do see where you are coming from, really, I do. I’m not sure about where your experience with religion comes from, but with regards to asking questions, one of the basic doctrinal distinctives of Protestantism is that individual people have the ability, and perhaps even the duty to attempt to further their understanding of God – in short, to ask questions. That ideal may often be corrupted or ignored in practice, but it is there. At the same time, it would lessen God to assume that we could understand everything about Him, that we could contain Him in the box of a human mind. A god which I can completely understand and reason through is no god at all, while, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a god which is completely un-understandable and illogical is distant and irrellevant.
@112 – I am glad to know that my misspelling of a small Latin abbreviation can tell you so much about me. I did happen to know that it was short for et cetera. And I do have some formal education in the sciences – I am a Computer Science major (and, incidentally, at the top of my class). I believe that jumping to conclusions also tends to show intellectual sloppiness. (and as arguing about Latin has a strong correlation with intellectual snobbery, I won’t bother looking up the Latin term for “jumping to conclusions”). Thank you though, for your sharp spelling lesson – I’ll be sure to spell it etc. from now on, and thus spread the glorious intellectual enlightenment.
To answer your other question, about personal experience, I can (and will) answer, but from the tone of your arguments I can almost guarantee that you will not understand, and likely write me off as delusional – that is your prerogative. But, my personal experience – simple, really, and rather subtle. A general sense that life is good, even when events are not necessarily so good. Peace, when difficult situations strike. Having sought divine guidance on issues where reason has exhausted itself and there is still a choice to be made, making the right decisions, and only realizing that they were, in truth, the right decisions months later. All these are tightly correlated with the strength of my relationship with God, my connection. You will likely write this all off as chemical reactions in my brain, as I said, that is your right – but which way does the causality run? Do I feel peace because of chemical reactions, or do the chemicals react because I feel peace, or somewhere between the two?
Finally, as someone else said, this argument is rather absurd – asking scientific proof for that outside the scientific. Science is a tool to understand and manipulate the physical universe. Science tells us what happens, but why they happen is beyond its scope. Gravity: matter is attracted to other matter – Science can tell us some of the mechanisms of it – but why it works is well outside its purview. Framing the debate in terms of scientific evidence limits its scope to the physical universe. If you believe that that universe comprises the whole of reality, than you are, by necessity, atheist, as those bounds on reality exclude God.
#115: Because otherwise Moses (and others–I’m not singling out Judaism/Christianity/Islam, they’re all like this) wouldn’t know enough to start one of many very profitable religions.
Religion is all about money; collection plates and baskets are everywhere. If you don’t believe so, take a look at the many religions that seem to be very profitable. The religions that aren’t profitable eventually fade away.
Atheism and agnosticism aren’t really religions, because people of those non-beliefs don’t take up collections, and make money only if they manage to write books that sell a few copies. Even the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Church of the SubGenius (heh) is more of a religion than atheism or agnosticism.
BillyBob, when you quote “I have no choice but to become intolerant.”, you have taken it completely out of context….typical of the resolve to protect religion at any cost. If I were to walk by you many times a day every day with a sign saying that Billy Bob is an evil person and chanting the same, while in my off hours I would sometimes evil, sometimes atrocious acts… are you telling me you would tolerate that?
My gosh, the longest series of remarks yet. Someone must have touched a nerve.
#109
> Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth,
> actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of
> what happened defies belief.
Frankly, it is clear you do not understand the difference between an acceptance of something and the absence of acceptance. Atheism, by its very definition, is the absence of belief in the supernatural. Absence of belief is not itself a belief. Were that the case, everyone would hold an infinite number of beliefs: those they affirmatively hold and the infinite beliefs which they do not hold. To even discuss the later is the height of sophistry.
BillyBob, when you quote “I have no choice but to become intolerant.”, you have taken it completely out of context….typical of the resolve to protect religion at any cost.
If you look at the original screed he repeated the line several times along with perceived slights/justifications for why he’s intolerant. I don’t think I misquoted him, you just don’t like hearing it repeated back to you because it sounds disturbingly…fundie.
If I were to walk by you many times a day every day with a sign saying that Billy Bob is an evil person and chanting the same, while in my off hours I would sometimes evil, sometimes atrocious acts… are you telling me you would tolerate that?
It’s called free speech, which I would defend to the death, just as I would counter-protesters. Hypocrisy does not invalidate people’s rights or even their debate positions. Demonizing the religious is no better than demonizing atheists.
By the way I’m an agnostic.
As an aside… WOW! The well connected brain cells on this thread make me feel very average… which of course I am.
Lauren, OFTLO, Peter Jakobs, Thomas, and Misanthropic Scott (although you scare me sometimes 😉 ) and a few others really have your shit together.
And Bruce IV, it’s obvious you have exceptional brains too. I would love to have them but I wouldn’t treat them as poorly as you. Your comeback to ect., etc., was partly a “slam dunk” but your claim to both science and religion as compatible is doubtful. There is no adversity to religious beliefs in computer science that I know of. If you were in the natural sciences you would have to face the incompatibly between the two. In essence, you are fooling yourself (your wonderful brain) into believing you can have it both ways. Such a waste IMO.