Bio-Science at the Crossroads

Prathaab

Hats of to you sir! well said. I do believe we need more freethinkers to capture and take custody (no joint custody) of ``good`` and spread the word. However, in our lifetimes, Gill Sahib would agree, the religious cults will be in majority. They will continue to alter history and knowledge untill science prevails. Science will prevail inevitably.

If religion were just a private club for loonies and the misguided and those being taken advantage of, carrying on its practices behind closed doors with its incense and its candles and its dressing up and its peculiar rituals and its collections, that would be okay, more or less.

But it isn`t just a private club. It has taken custody of ``good``. Religion claims the right to determine what is good, and what is bad/evil, and it appropriates unto itself the right to tell the rest of us what to think and how to think on various subjects, and what `being bad` is.

We are put in this club or that (Muslim, Christian, Protestant, Church of the Yellow Rabbit) before we can think for ourselves. There, often, we tend to stay, even once we can think for ourselves. The music may be rather nice. The social gatherings may be rather nice. What being religious (and therefore righteous?) says about us may be rather nice. Too nice to leave, whatever we believe.

If religion can`t say, hand on heart, ``this is definitely what a god thinks, he told us so``, then they should shut up and stop making it up.

The problem with debates on religion is that they turn into an ``us-versus-them`` affair with all secularists branded as unreconstructed atheists and enemies of the faith, and all believers as irrational and fanatical.

Will the world ever manage to get rid of religion? Probably not. We are stuck with it.
I am always shocked when those who consider themselves to be `intelligent` (I am thinking of Bush and Blair, among others) continue to believe that their lives are controlled by a man who lives in the sky.

If an alien landed from another planet and was told `I have never seen God, I just know he`s there, and he can see what everyone is doing at the same time, and I go into a building and sing songs to Him..` they would faint with incredulity.

Not to mention `when I am dead, I will carry on living, if I behave myself now`...

Unfortunately people who believe this sort of stuff have the ear and maybe heart (if not brain) of the world`s only remaining super-power. Christianity doesn`t have the monopoly on religious bigots. Religion and its obsession with genitalia may be mildly amusing at first glance....but sadly I don`t think it`s harmless and I don`t think it`s going away.