Victor Stenger, noted atheist, has come up with the following ad for London buses.Speaking as someone who is religious, I wholeheartedly agree: science does fly you to the moon, and religion does fly you into buildings.
Whatever benefits an individual, or a society, might derive from religion, there are real dangers associated with people assuming that a supreme being sanctions their actions.
I would also add that the socialist critique of religion, that it is used to maintain the power of the powerful, Karl Marx said that, "Religion is the opiate of the masses," is yet another concern.
I would argue that most of these problems are more an artifact of religion than they are of private and personal faith, and, interestingly enough, the majority of the founding fathers, including George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, would wholeheartedly agree on this point.
1 comments :
This is almost too silly to rebut, but since this is such a common trope, I will.
Science gives the West, and the U.S. specifically, the power to kill, destroy and oppress millions around the world. What are the few thousands killed by the improvised planes-turned-cruise-misslies compared with the hundreds of thousands killed by advanced machinary in Iraq and Afghanistan? We can add those to the millions killed in the 20th century in the name of completely secular goals using the latest and greatest science could deliver.
If we are so inclined, we could throw in such scientific non-religious ideas as social darwinism and eugenics.
It's not even a close call - science has done much more harm than religion did (at least in modern times).
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