It’s exactly that. “Don’t waste your time with the magic pixie and do real stuff (like us)”. It’s an insult (you deluded imbeciles) disguised as a question.
Most non/lapsed believers spend Sunday NOT researching leptons, the effects of a 25cent raise on the minimum wage, nor the usefulness of golden rice.
Bolding mine, You might want to dig a bit deeper on that assumption. I know its really hard to find good info on where tithing money goes in this country but I have seen (I believe it was here on the dope) where an average church disappears about 98% of the money coming in leaving about 2% for charity.
Because the two–scientific knowledge and religious belief–are mutually incompatible.
Science isn’t learned “spontaneously”; it’s learned by studying the work of all those who have come before you. This takes time and effort.
Probably because religion is both stupid and cool. It’s stupid for reasons amply discussed elsewhere. It’s cool for the art, music, and literature it has produced. It’s good for the same reason alcoholic beverages are good: to help people deal with the hard-to-answer and/or insoluble questions in life (and I’m fully aware that it answers those questions with lies, but the comfort, even if illusory, is valuable on a societal level).
I do think that if we dragged everybody out of the churches and made them watch PBS and read books and stuff, that we’d make as much progress as if we showed Carl Sagan videos to our dogs. If you attend church, you’re reality- and learning-resistant, so you’d be bored by science and resentful that someone was attempting to replace your source of comfort.
The time I spend with friends drinking beer is some of the best time I experience. So, no.
Tried that one already. Remind me to send you the pictures.
FYI, It was fun but ended ugly.
Does it hurt to be so wrong?
I don’t know what you think I said was “wrong,” but as an example of science and religion’s incompatibility, science says that the earth is four billion+ years old, while religion says that God created earth six thousand years ago in a little poof of fairy dust. Those two views are incompatible and cannot be held simultaneously without a large dose of cognitive dissonance.
No, “religion” doesn’t say that. A very tiny number of adherents of one of the earth’s many religions traditions say that.
Young-earth creationism is to religion as homeopathy is to science, basically.
OK, then, name any one of a myriad of beliefs common to just about all religions, such as that dead people aren’t actually dead. Or that there is some magical presence watching over us to make sure that we obey all the rules and preparing rewards if we do and punishments if we don’t.
Religion and reason, if you like, are the two things that are incompatible, since you don’t need to be a scientist (or have been exposed to any science at all) to know that religion doesn’t pass the smell test.
That is not a “very tiny number”.
Nonsense; it’s no different than any number of religious beliefs. And science and homeopathy differ in that science works while homeopathy doesn’t; while YEC and virtually all other other religious beliefs are alike in that they are false. Your comparison doesn’t work.
Religion is based on faith, and faith is the denial of facts and logic. Including such facts as the history of Earth and the origin of humanity.
Neither of those beliefs are “just about common to all religions”. Surely as a scientist interested in the phenomenon of religion you should start with evidence an emperical examination of the phenomenon rather than flinging around off-the-shelf preconceptions popular among the more voluble but less thoughtful denizens of atheist and agnostic discussion forums?
This sentence doesn’t make any sense. For an advocate of reason, you’re not doing terribly well.
Of course they are. An afterlife and some kind of punishment for misdeeds is the norm among religions, whether it’s in the form of Heaven, Hell and God’s judgement or reincarnation and karma.
:dubious: It makes perfect sense. Desert Dumpster is just making the point that religion is obviously not true, just as for example Santa Claus is obviously not true. You don’t need to be a scientist or even unusually smart or well educated to see through religion any more than you need to be one to see through Santa Claus; a normal adult only needs to not be determined to believe either of them to see through them.
Look, the thesis that religion and science (or reason and science) are fundamentally incompatible is obviously undermined by pointing to towering scientific figures who were also religious believers - Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Gregor Mendel. These examples could easily be multiplied.
Given that, those who advocate for fundamental incompatibility, if they wish to be taken seriously, need to articulate some reasonably persuasive argument, as opposed to mouthing vague platitudes like that religion “doesn’t pass the smell test” or meaningless unsupported generalities that religion “is obviously not true”.
Tell me that creationism is incompatible with science; I will cheer you to the echo; tell me that religion = creationism, and I call BS.
Der Trihs, not all Christians live in the U.S.
And that’s a very, very good thing. 
Who were hampered by their religion if not outright threatened by it. And who lived in a time where not being religious was unthinkable.
It’s neither meaningless nor unsupported, any more than disbelief in Santa Claus is meaningless or unsupported. The falsehood of religion is obvious even to believers, as long as it isn’t their religion; believers mock the obvious nonsense in religions other than their own all the time.
To quote my signature:* “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”* – Steven Roberts
A great many do however; enough so that forty-six percent is not a “tiny number”.
Gregor Mendel lived in a time when not being religious was unthinkable?
And some of the believers that bother you so much mock science; does that make the falsehood of science obvious?
The fact that there are disagreements among religious people doesn’t mean that religion is inherently false, andy more than disagreements among scientists mean that science is ultimately bogus.
What make you think that all religious people dismiss all other possible gods? You don’t need to know too much about religion to know that that’s not in fact the case.
The Gallup poll you refer to found that 46% of American adults believed that humans (NB not the earth, which was the claim I was critiqueing) were created less than 10,000 years ago.
46% of American adults would be about 242 million people. Worldwide, there are about 5.8 billion people who are affiliated with, or identify with, a religion. So you’ve got about 4% of religious people there, give or take. And I’d suggest the onus is on you to show that the statistic tells us more about religion than it does about Americans.
No, because science works. There’s no symmetry between the two.
In other words, not a tiny number.
Also, I note that like most defenders of religion you are ignoring the Santa Claus analogy - no doubt because you can’t really defend religion without defending belief in Santa Claus. And because the Santa Claus argument makes it clear that yes, religion is obvious nonsense just as Santa Claus is obvious nonsense.
46% of American adults does not equal 242 million. According to the Census, Table 1 on this page, the number of people 19 and older is 226 million. 46% of that number is 104 million, or about 1.4% of the Earth’s population.
Der Trihs, the guy gave an obviously wrong number and you accepted it because it was wrong on your side. Shame on you. 