@religion-is-a-mental-illness / religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com
All it takes is curiosity, intellectual honesty and work (i.e. the opposite of religious “faith”).
“The scientific facts about our origins and the existence of everything are infinitely more awesome and beautiful than anything religions teach in their mythological creation stories.”
Science saves you from “god’s plan.”
Creationist Questions Translated - #2.
aka Science Illiteracy - The Failure of Education, Exhibit B.
Creationist Questions Translated - #1.
aka Science Illiteracy - The Failure of Education, Exhibit A.
Science is bad because science includes honesty and correction.
Admitting ignorance is the essential first step in the scientific method. Previously tested and accepted hypotheses, and even well established theories, should be tested over and over. Religion of course has so such burden to discovery truths.
Religion handed in its answer sheet millennia ago, bound and laminated, smug in the certainty it was right.
It has spent the years since firstly killing and imprisoning anyone who figured out they were wrong, then trying to convince people that the right answers are wrong while the wrong answers are right, and more recently, trying to scratch out and change their answers in order to pretend they knew them in the first place.
Science never hands in its answer sheet. It goes over everything again and again and again to make sure it’s accurate and supportable, while constantly adding more questions to explore.
Same “god” who “designed” the placement of the prostate.
It’s called belief. We believe. That’s it. You have no better explanation, in fact your scientific theories are more far-fetched than mine.
Time and time again I encounter this type of thinking that declares their beliefs, which don’t have a shred of evidence, are on equal ground with scientific explanations. The common denominator is an unwillingness to understand. I recently had a user PM and started a short debate about god. (I’m not going to out the person.) Our entire conversation can be summed up as them declaring God exists, me asking for proof, them ignoring my request and restating their claim.
Religion isn’t the only area where people do this, but it’s most common with religion. It hurts to be wrong, we are ashamed and frustrated, and because of our cultural of one-up-manship, self-centered pride, and ridicule, we have all learned to avoid these feels if possible. For some this leads us to reject reason and facts and it’s easy to do when there are so many others who feel the same way. We are all guilty in some part for creating these conditions.
However this does not change the fact that religion is factually wrong and their explanations have been disproved. To address the anon’s claim, everything we know is because science discovered the explanation: the weather, the movement of planets, the shape of the Earth, the reason for seasons, how life developed, what causes illness and how to treat it. The discussion of explanations is quite important, because the Bible claims to be the word of an immutable creator that apparently couldn’t describe anything accurately. The Bible has literally never given an accurate explanation for any natural phenomenon. I subscribe to the hypothesis that the entire purpose of religion was to explain natural phenomenon and they did they best they could.
Anon, scientific theories by definition are not far-fetched because they are proven. The theory of gravity is a fact, plate tectonics theory is a fact, the theory of evolution is a fact, germ theory is a fact, oxygen theory of combustion is a fact, general and special relativity are facts, heliocentrism is a fact.
However, god is not fact, heaven is not a fact, miracles are not a fact, angels and demons are not facts, and so on. I understand that you believe them, but these are not equal to scientific explanations of the world.
When they only have “faith,” they assume that everyone else’s understanding of the world is as tenuous and flawed as their own.
Scientific principles can be demonstrated and substantiated.
More than that, though, and much more devastating to religion, is that we build our world around these scientific principles, and guess what? They work! Medicines cure diseases and alleviate pain, cars drive, planes fly, electricity flows, microwaves cook, computers compute, and the internet allows the scientifically illiterate to mouth off and publicly demonstrate their first grade-level understanding of the world around them. Just as these scientific principles say they will.
That’s absolutely freaking extraordinary, for these complex systems we build around us to actually work, based on nothing but “far-fetched” faith-based claims. It’s almost like.... like we actually figured these things out. It’s almost like we took the evidence of everything around us, examined it, built models that provide both explanatory and predictive power, substantiated them, tested them, refined them if they needed to be, threw them away if they were outright wrong, assessed them, tested them some more, over and over. That’s gotta be like, cheating almost, to hunt for explanations for evidence, instead of the other way around!
On the other hand, none of the 10,000+ “god” models has ever been substantiated or demonstrated to line up with reality. We literally cannot resolve a single one of them; for one thing, they all claim to be the “one true” model, yet provide no explanatory power, just generate more unanswered questions.
The very idea that science is just a belief, completely on par with religion, that your entire life isn’t surrounded by the practical applications of extensively-supported scientific principles at every single moment of every single day, is unmitigated, deliberate, shameless dishonesty.
