Trauma

To The Unfan, you're not understanding what I'm saying, and you're being a douchebag.

That's not necessarily true, just because you find a person in hide and go seek doesn't mean the game's over.

Also, religion can be whatever people choose to believe in order for them to more easily cope with the reality of their lives.

__________________
A mi no me importa nada
Para mi la vida es un sueño

The Unfan

I might understand it if it made some reasonable sense as opposed to a chain of irrational beings doing irrational things in places that aren't realistic.

DontRunMeOver

Science is largely a type of religion. Sciences like geology, anatomy and whatever you call the study of crystals might be largely based on empirical data that we can observe (in other words, facts) but the more 'fundamental' sciences of physics and chemistry mostly revolve around concepts like atoms, electrons, wave-particle duality, energy levels and interpretation of spectra and analytical reactions which are actually very abstract and probably not very close to the truth at all. These sciences are based on models, not 'realities' or 'facts'. They are simplifications of what is actually going on concieved so that humans can try to understand it and can attempt to use the models to achieve what they want.

In order to practise science you have to have faith in the models, the 'assumptions' of which could just as easily be called 'beliefs'... this can involve believing that the models are actually realistic accounts of what is going on, or accepting that they aren't actually correct but that they can give guidelines which you can follow to do what you need to do.

So in my opinion science is itself a religion. It's not necessarily exclusive of the other religions but it certainly gets a lot more done.

__________________

beat yr own KID

Science is not like religion. Religion = based on faith and hope. Science = based on logic and tests. A scientist isn't gonna say ANYTHING is fact until, using logic, has answered every rational question about it.

__________________
I was dead. This was hell. There were no demons, no hellfire or brimstone, just a deep, complete feeling of darkness and hopelessness. This was the never-ending void. Not at all how I had imagined it, but worse than I thought that it could have been.

Voodoo Chile

Science is only right until it's proven wrong years later. It was once a "scientific fact" that the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Sounds pretty stupid now, doesn't it? And a hundred years from now, people are going to look back at our "scientific facts" and think that we were idiots for ever believing them. So really, science may as well be a religion. You're putting your faith in a mere human in a lab coat. A scientific test doesn't conclusively prove anything, it's just a theory that'll most likely be "disproven" later on by another theory, which'll be "disproven" later on by another theory, and so on. Science, religion, it's all just theories.

__________________
Free your mind and your ass will follow.
The kingdom of heaven is within.

beat yr own KID

They're not the same. At all. There is a big difference between someone trying to figure out fact and someone beliving a being in the sky did it. Unlike in religion, science does have some facts. Are you going to deny gravity? Science has pretty much proven that as fact. Or that everything is comprised of atoms? So yeah, I do put more "faith" in a guy in a lab coat. Unlike a god, he's shown some actual results.

__________________
I was dead. This was hell. There were no demons, no hellfire or brimstone, just a deep, complete feeling of darkness and hopelessness. This was the never-ending void. Not at all how I had imagined it, but worse than I thought that it could have been.

riseagainstrocks

It wasn't a scientific fact. The scientific method wasn't applied to these things.

What's your alternative to this apparantly misplaced faith in science? Thing that rain is angels crying? Spontaneous genesis?

I would say that science has aspects of a religion while not being one itself. Soley because all religions have a belief in the supernatural (of something, not neccessarily a diety) whereas science seeks to remove the prescence of a diety in everything.

__________________
One note timeless, came out of nowhere...

Trauma

But that's exactly what I'm saying might be, except god's medium is reality, and our's is just a distorted copy of that, warped by its imagination, a personalised reflection of something in some other place in which we can't begin to ever define the rules.

__________________
A mi no me importa nada
Para mi la vida es un sueño

The Unfan

CAPTAIN AWESOME THE MIGHTIEST SUPER HERO EVER WILL SAVE THE DAY.

Trauma

Not what I'm saying.

How about this: ignorant teenage boy with tons of bravado preaching about the non-existence of God on an internet forum to show credibility for his cynical "free-thinking, wanna be new age revolutionary" theories contradicting any study of theology ever conducted in the past two millenia.

__________________
A mi no me importa nada
Para mi la vida es un sueño