US ambassador killed over a film

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The notion that science is objective and rational is flawed.

A partial list of the problems with science include the following:

Scientists often have an agenda. Some examples of agendas include: getting funding, proving their views to be correct, political aims, getting published. These agendas can result in the scientist finding the result he or she is seeking to find.

Many scientific papers, including those published in respected journals fail to demonstrate sound scientific method. Common problems include a failure to control the variables, and conclusions which are not justified by the results. I know whereof I speak on this. My master's thesis was a critical examination of a certain segment of the medical literature, and most studies that I examined were flawed.

Manipulation of results and fabrication of experiments are not unknown in the scientific community.

The decision on what papers get published is made by men. Articles can be rejected or accepted for reasons which have little to do with their actual merit.

But no-one takes a single paper out of some journal and holds it as the ultimate truth, starts a church and a political party and tries to force other people to do the same.

If a paper is crap, fraudulent or whatever and important enough the truth will come out. Not every scientist has the purest of methods, but science as a whole works.

Religion doesn't. Take the Bible, since some very brave men led us out of the dark ages every time again things considered facts by the Catholic church have been proven to be wrong.....and this is a continuous process.
Of course it will not help to make people understand, because 'believing' has nothing to do with facts.

@kandrathe; yes religion can have positive sides.....but that doesn't make things in the bible true. (and as I said before I mean the supernatural things mainly)

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Not quite. The "god gene" and the issue of "memes" are both topics of somewhat deeper examination than your discarding this as a simple fallacy.

Which gene is this? I don't think we have isolated anything like a "god gene". Vague speculation by famous atheists is nowhere near enough.

Memes, this is precisely the point - we have created a taxonomy of memes that lumps a bunch of disparate things together as "spiritual." But they share little, and are mutually contradictory. Their "similarity" is a product of our perspective, not an objective phenomenon.

I forget if it was Harris or Dawkins who arrived at the conclusion that over time, humans seem to have become hardwired toward that predilection. An interesting manifestation of evolution, no matter how you slice it, no matter your own biases.

I'll believe it when I see the genetics. Right now, it's all just a bunch of speculation - if you don't understand something about psychology, just blame evolution, and who can gainsay you? It's an "explanation" that explains nothing.

-Jester

I agree, looking for religion is a social thing. Someone who grows up in a land where no one ever talks about religion will not become religious.
People are scared and people like comfort.....religion helps you with that and that is why it attracts people. And that is indeed completely natural.

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You are the one making this an all or nothing proposition. The claim is that X and Y are incompatible, regardless of the countless number of successful renowned practitioners of X & Y. In those cases, the claim is that they are brain washed by their parents and incapable of exercising their vast IQ toward extirpating that residue of fuzzy thinking from their psyche. Which, speaking as a parent, vastly overstates our ability to shape a child's psyche, and vastly understates a geniuses capability to change their minds.

As I said before, this has nothing to with intelligence. Brainwashing is very powerful....and fear of hell can keep people in church for their whole life.

Take the fact that most serial killers have had troubled childhoods.
Sexual predators also most off the time have been abused when they were a child. YES your upbringing can screw you up for the rest of your life.

A high IQ can help you to escape from your religion, but it is absolutely no guarantee.