Will religion die out?

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I haven't made a study of penguins so I don't know if rapists are properly punished there. But at least the black and white costumes are quite Catholic. Have you read Anatole France's novel "Island of the Penguins" where a near sighted monk gave a flock of penguins souls? Very revealing.

I voted 'yes'. If any belief in my life is the result of irrational faith & wishful thinking it's that religion will one day wither & die, but I just can't bear to think that humanity will persist in such folly till the bombs go off.

The current evaluation of Obama's cabinet choices indicate they are indeed very well educated and clever and yet they were intimately involved in the basic causes of the financial disaster in the USA. A couple of columnists have noted that JFK's cabinet was also made up of "The Best and the Brightest" and they sank the USA into the Vietnam disaster. Perhaps intelligence is not the answer. I doubt the termites or the ants would cause the ecological disasters humanity is giving birth to. Although religion is the stupidest social activity of mankind it seems still to be very well accepted and the enthusiasm of the far right in the USA for the end of the world may yet bring it about.

Actually Chris Dodd and Charlie Wrangle are the sub-prime heroes there, boldly holding their ground quiet well against reform attempts presented in 2004 and 2005 by Bush and republican senate/house members. Obama did some training for ACORN activists who also applied pressure on banks with sit-ins which loosely implicates him (well, the fact that he got more money from both than anyone else in just a couple years does as well), as far as Hillary and Joe I think their roles were minimal. The big mistake - never enact social policy through free-market apparatus.



Just as tragic, maybe even moreso, was Nixon's decision that we'd already won and pulling the troops out - they were able to hold out until 1975 before the millions in the South were butchered. From the look of history it seems as if we had more grounds to go into Iraq in 2003 than we did Vietnam, unless we thought it was of particular strategic importance in the nuclear arms race (maybe threat to Japan?) I'm not sure what our motivations were for going in.

Ironically the enemy didn't beat us in that war; we, our news media, and our politicians defeated the soldiers and assured that their sacrifices were for naught. The Tet offensive did not go down the way people like to make it out either; we really pulled out because of our own media and what was happening to the public over here. What we have learned though; in situations like this, never do that again.



Caveman mentality is really the culprit, the evil, that makes religion an issue. There are intelligent people, there are stupid people, and unfortunately with the stupid there's not a lot you can do to keep them from doing stupid things. You will not, however, be able to categorically lambaste religion all together because *they* exist. You can diss people who swallow dogma enough to try taking a bus into Canada to say that the guy who was butchered coming back from Winnipeg died because Canada marries gays (our wonderful Westboro goat-f'''ers), you can diss people who blow up buildings and commuter trains all the while flipping any situation around to pretend they're the victims - those are all easy and no-brainer targets. However, I find it really callow and intellectually lazy when people lump it *all* together and come to the conclusion that Darwinian evolution deadens any argument. While I don't fault atheists for taking a stance, they do as well as theists, its just crazy when people have a supremacist attitude - that they have all the answers, that they need look no further, forbid they have another thought that might actually jar them out of their own preconceived bubble - their self-ascribed genius is purely a miracle of their own lack of perspective.

Not as long as humans' ingrained irrational nature doesn't die out.

And it won't. That which you call "irrational" is human nature, Mr. Spock.

Ha! Good one.

Actually, the Flat Earth Society is satire created by atheists to point out the absurdity of the creationist movement.

I think they both satirize themselves when they get too far ahead of themselves. Pure evolution on earth is a possibility, creation is also a possibility. In the possibility that creation did happen though, its sure as heck not a new-earth thing; part of the reason that I really like reading people like Michael Novak is that they can demonstrate the theist side without all the thatch, chaff, and baggage that many people unfortunately would bring to the table (just as Jürgen Habermas is an excellent example of a similar quality of atheist). I think we need to pay more attention to the eloquent from both sides rather than the passionate.

Hear, hear!

I consider myself to be neither Creationist nor Evolutionist, if both those positions require an absolue rigidity of thought. Abiogenesis is pretty much the only thing I can't get behind as far as that goes. But I choose the hills I die on, and there are worthier hills ...

Creationist I think only implies that the origin is not purely what we think of today as science, it applies to a much broader range of ideas than just Adam and Eve old testament stuff. Evolution and Creationism I don't think are necessarily opposed, nor does it seem like belief in or proof of evolution really holds any proof whether or not there was an actual uncaused-cause or unmoved-mover in the beginning or at any other points in the process.

I can only laugh at the whimsy when I, a peaceful, tolerant, and rational person, get labeled as a peace-hating, intolerant, irrational freak merely because I believe in Jesus...

Creationism is what happens when you interpret stuff literally... Surprisingly, all of the Young-Earth creationists I know are NTs, while I don't know any aspies, even christians, that believe in a literal 7-day creation...

Most sane adherents to Christianity I know believe that, yes, God created the heavens and the Earth, in an event roughly 13.7 billion years ago called the Big Bang. Since, according to my own (and many other mainline Christian) beliefs, He created the universe and all that is within it, that means that He also created the laws of physics, and let them do the work. It's not Deism, it's more like He's rendering an entire universe in real-time, which any gamer or 3D modeling buff would recognize as a true measure of His power...

I see no reason to hold a high opinion of Mother Theresa. She was a twisted sado/masochist who was primarily concerned with spreading her influence in the Catholic church. She did very little good for the poor, and a whole lot of good for Papal prestige.

Are you sure creationism strictly applies to young-earth? As much as I keep hearing it I would have sworn it extended to any uncaused cause.

It gets extended by people who don't want to believe in one of God's mechanics: evolution... (Darwin just discovered it, but it was a force long before Darwin ever existed, so Darwin obviously didn't create it...)