There's a perfectly logical reason JDude is being pigpiled right now, and I don't think the reason is "to test his faith."
However it's nice that nobody's flipped out yet. I would've liked to be countered by one of the "faithful" but... nobody wants to read my massive rants >_> Alas.
Throughout history, it's a general trend that faith in the form of unwavering belief generally just leads to a major superiority complex. And once people start believing that they're "The Chosen" that's when they start treating other people like animals. That's what the Japanese were thinking when they raped Nanking. That's what the Crusaders were thinking when they raped Jerusalem. That's what the Americans were thinking when they wiped out the Native Americans (manifest destiny). Heck, it's probably what Israeli soldiers think when they gun down Palestinians, and it's also what Palestinians think when they blow themselves up on Israelis!
It goes on and on... and they all "knew," and it was all "proven" to them via the incorruptable power of believing exactly what you're told.
It's a frustrating conversation... but I don't blame you for your stance. To change it would be to shatter your safe little world. Science doesn't provide you with comfort; it provides you with facts, and with them, you decide what to do. Freely. Science is, partially, a matter of belief, this is correct. I do not look through the electron microscopes. Many religious folks use this argument in an attempt to discredit it and place it on the same level as a religion, however, science is more importantly a matter of synergy. It is a combination of subjective perspectives and experiences, millions of them, constantly refining, repeating, checking every part of it, challenging every idea and making new ones. Using science we're able to combine all of our subjective experiences and experiments in order to uncover that very concept we call truth: objectivity. And that which we call unknown only represents endless possibility, endless truth which we have yet to uncover. There is nothing soulless or cold about it, unless you decide to view it that way. And people only view it that way because science has a habit of discrediting the lofty myths that people have believed for eons to comfort themselves.
Religion, on the other hand, refuses to be changed; when it does, it is an injury, not a success. Religion is interpreted differently by every individual, and when conflict arises, there is no right or wrong... because it is strictly a matter of interpretation, strictly a matter of belief. The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, they are all interpreted and learned from by individuals much in the same way any piece of literature is interpreted.
The law of gravity, however, requires no interpreting. There is right and wrong, true and false as we discover it... but we must always keep in mind, and here is the big difference, that we could be wrong about any given thing at any given moment (something religion NEVER concedes to do itself). The reason we DO believe in it at all is because the results given by science are PROVABLE and VERIFIABLE in an organized manner by truckloads of people. It is believed to be true because it uses that logical method, and logic is the only way humans have ever been able to discover anything they can constantly, reliably, reproducably, and thus near-unwaverably call true. As I said before, it's the only reason you can read a Bible in the first place.
If you view science as religion, then it's the most successful religion in the history of the planet. It's miracles can be seen every day, and what's great furthermore is they are almost all perfectly explicable, perfectly replicable. And while there are certainly many disagreements within science itself, there are no major divisions in science to the point of the divisions in actual religions (i.e people are able to, for the greater part, agree on the majority of it), and most importantly there are no scientists dehumanizing, maiming, killing, or otherwise destroying other humans because they disagree with science.
I suppose this won't be read either but I can't help saying it.
