Rico Penguin

  I’m sure I’ve quoted this enough times that it looks like I’d sleep with Galileo or at the very least take him to dinner (which I surely would…dinner that is). This phrase is, to me, one of the most powerful statements in the history of civilized man. The full line is "The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

  While I am known for my rather callous feelings towards religion. This is not the goal of this post and indeed 99% of my posts are not trying to butcher the faithful upon a pedestal. What I’m here to discuss today especially is what religion cannot do and will never be able to do.

  There has never and will never be a scientific use for faith. All of the benefits that people get medically from being religious have been seen with equal success in merely positive people. It provides absolutely no aid to any real world field of science. This is no a negative to faith, because it was never meant to do such a thing (or at least I don’t believe it ever outwardly advertised such), however in modern day it is a huge flaw that is overlooked by many who have vendettas against certain scientific beliefs.

  Obviously to many this is a post in response to intelligent design, formerly known as creationism, and even before that known by 4-5 names. As was stated in a very good book I’ve been reading (“only a theory”) it would appear that more often than not religion is not trying to explain how something works but instead is trying to merely get credit for the something.

  You cannot discover how malaria spreads, why the suns light gives people skin cancer, nor can it even explain why people cannot breath underwater. We didn’t decode the human genome with a single bit of guidance by any book of faith nor did we make it to the moon through the discoveries found in any scripture.

  There will never be a time when faith can properly function as a scientific tool and likewise there will never be a time when science can function properly as a tool of faith. Each is by its very roots incompatible with the other. This is not to say you cannot be a faithful scientist, that is a scientists who for whatever reason has religious convictions, but neither will benefit the other. They exist in solitude from one another and that is by no means a bad thing.

  The danger is when we make the mistake of assuming that faith can save our biological selves. We do not need another era of trephinations to remind us of what happens when we fight that truth. So as many have, much more eloquently than I, this is a modest request to cease and desist with the incessant attempts to use faith as a tool of science. In the end it helps no one and creates various problematic and violent situations.

  Well that’s it for today, I will likely discuss the book linked above once I finish it. It is fantastic though and roughly 50% of the way through it I suggest anyone read it who has the ability to do so.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30890934/

  Now it isn’t an isolated incident, there are nations that have been battling for hundreds if not thousands of years merely because of a disagreement in literature. I know people say that even without faith we will still have conflict but I tend to think that once people are fighting over which is better, star trek or star wars, we’ll be able to step back and stop it much easier.

  In my mind I wonder though, what benefits do religion give you that you couldn’t acquire by simply being a positive human being? Neither is necessary to have the other so this is not a case of parsing how you could do one without the other.

  Just how much dependency on a belief is too much is another thing I’d be interested in knowing. When you ignore simple medical care and allow your child to die, when you rush to develop nuclear weaponry simply to attack another group of people who disagree with you on a single aspect of your life. At what point do we step back and just say “Whoa”…likewise just when will I start using question marks again to end my questions?

  That’s where I stand though, I’m just not grasping the gain. The benefit of glorifying death over life. For now I just read the newspaper and see event after event that is pretty upsetting. Taking course after course where there is a single theme that holds true.

  However amidst it all I’m pretty positive about life, that to me is what counts. In case you were curious .