In the What Contradictions? thread, which in my opinion has run its course. Malkut, referring to me as - Greasy, which I kind of like, mentioned an "argument" on the subject of science being religion. It is my position that science is religion to most atheists and skeptics; I don't think that science itself is a religion, as such, but it is a religion to those mentioned because it is an answer to the meaning of life to those who had trouble with accepting the Bible as the answer. Science is a belief which they cling to. Religion.
I am making this post here instead of the science board because that is my position. I have nothing against science, but I do have a deep hatred of all things religious.
Greasy wrote:
What always fascinated me about students of science who oppose the Bible for primarily religious reasons is that they would cling to replicas like religious relics, blindly venerate their leaders, assume everyone who don't believe as they do are beneath them, enforce their doctrine in public schools and resent religious funding that they themselves desire without seeing the obvious fact that they are religious in nature and differ from those receiving that funding only in that they are not receiving it.
One Brow Wrote:
Well, duh. The various species of Australopithecus lived some 4 million years ago, long before any adaptations that we would recognize as being human features. That's why the genus is not Homo. If they were like men, there would be no genus of Australopithecus.
Of course, they don't look like members of the genus Pan (chimps+bonobos), Gorilla (4 species), or Pongo (2 species of Oranutans). We think they look like apes because humans more strongly identify differences from being human than the differences between any two apes. To a member of Pongo, the bipedal, tool-carrying Australopithecus would look much more like Homo than Pan, Gorilla, or Pongo.
Now One Brow (and I know that One Brow will read this because of a need to defend and protect a religious position that feels comfortable to One Brow ) once told me that as a believer he / she read the Bible every day until losing faith in it, more or less. In my response to the Dan Barker Challenge Yark Hutprancer rightfully pointed out that Mr. Barker's challenge could be refuted by simply coming to whatever conclusion that the reader wished to come to. Certain women were said to have visited Jesus' tomb and other Bible writers didn't mention some of those women by name leaving the conclusion up to the reader. This is possible because there is no real contradiction.
The faithful adherent to the religion of science, always a skeptic or atheist, will see it as a contradiction because they must see it as such. To reaffirm their faith. The evolution of faith is not an easy thing to deal with. It leaves deep scars, as can be seen by the juvenile hatred dripping from every word Malkut and Yark Hutprancer write here at this, the church of Science.
You see, science, as One Brow so eloquently demonstrated, needn't dig any deeper than Christianity or any other transmogrification of ancient texts by religious beliefs to justify their faith. It is in the eye of the beholder - blind he will refute the science of old like the outdated references One Brow responded to. Those references concluded without a doubt that what my science teacher taught me was crap. The scant traces of "man's ancestors" were just monkeys, not, as was then preached from the pulpit of our public schools, ape-men.
It is a good thing, One Brow said, that the faithful had smart people to figure that all out!
But that is easy enough, to the faithful scientians, all they must do is believe that those teeth had something to do with evolution, and draw the conclusions they need so desperately to draw.
How's that for troll bait, Malky?
