It’s not a big elephant in the room. I can’t help it if a bunch of otherwise smart atheists want to view it the same way as a bunch of otherwise stupid religious nuts. Creation myths are allegorical based upon primitive assumptions about the cosmos.
Yes, religions provide all sorts of things. Science doesn’t clash with ‘religion’ because there is no such unified entity known as ‘religion’. The word religion is meant to denote a category of human effort, it is not a singular thing, but a type of thing. Things of the type, ‘religion’, tend to be quite broad and have some very stark differences. Individual myths having facts conflicting with science are neither here nor there. ‘Religion’ as such doesn’t announce anything being that it’s a category with an extreme amount of variation that can encompass in varying combinations the vast majority of human activity throughout history from Senatorial procedure to whether or not it’s your duty to knock up your Brother’s wife in the event that he dies without leaving behind any progeny. In pre-modern religious societies ‘religion’ meant something roughly analogous to ‘society’.
No, you’re just using the word religion incorrectly. It’s commonly done because atheists with their lack of religion try to claim science as their own whereas science can be used equally effectively by the religious as by the atheist. The atheist commonly likes to make broad claims about religion that are too wide to be meaningful for any other purpose than vulgar condemnations of people who think differently than they do. I am using the word correctly, you are not. It’s as simple as that.
Another phrase you are using incorrectly. I didn’t make a No True Scotsman fallacy. I didn’t say ‘religious people don’t do X’, what I did say was that ‘religion is such a broad category that you can say just about anything about it and have a high likelihood of it being true.’ It’s actually the inverse of a no true Scotsman fallacy.
You can say for instance: The religious kill babies. And you’d be right. You can say: The religious believe in stupid creation myths. Again you’d be right. You can say: The religious conquer and enslave other peoples. And you’d be right. You can also say: The religious hold bake sales to fund construction work on their temples. And again you’d be right just as if you said: The religious don’t believe in God. And it would be true. Why? Because religion is a category, not a thing.
You’re defining religion incorrectly, and getting quite garbled in the process (either that, or shuffling goalposts around like you’re trying to play “find the pea”).
Nobody says religious people don’t use science. That’s dumb. The vast majority of religious people base actions on prior experience and observation all the time. Some even have admitted to believing in gravity, and one or two even admit the notion that the earth orbits the sun and vice versa. So what you’re doing is attacking a strawman.
To correct your category error, religion is either the term for (usually) organized establishments that (usually) are devoted to a given belief system that is (usually) based around a theories set of supernatural forces; or alternatively it is the collectived term for actions taken by the people in the service or due to the influence of groups like this, or belief systems comparable to such belief systems. People who associate with religions are considered “religious” or “the religious” - which is not a synonym for “religion”. And of course, not everything believed or done by a “religious” person is itself “religious” in nature.
Suffice to say, once one start using the terms correctly, your post collapses in shambles.
ETA: Oh, and your Scotsman fallacy obviously involved denying things were related to “religion” when they hurt your argument, specifically in this case creation myths. It had nothing to do with the “religious”, of course. That’s just your goalpost-moving dodge.
It appears I’m failing to grasp what you’re saying. I’ve said all along that science and religon are two different things that serve different purposes. Reading the above, you appear to be saying the same. What is the point of disagreement between us that you see?
You can’t make science a religion, but you can get religious people believe in science. A large number of the atheist community, be they new-age loons or science fetishists, are dogma-spewing sheep. Functionally it serves the same purpose. I’m not making any accusations against anyone on this board.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can’t contribute meaningfully to anything on this board because I don’t think anything can be done about the human condition.