Science vs Faith – Magazine Article Faith and Foolishness

I did not read the article but I agree with your last point – religion should not be immune from criticism. I don’t think it is, overall in our society today. I realize a lot of people are tuned out when they hear attacks aimed at their beliefs specifically, but I have hope that as a society we are becoming more open minded and willing to look more objectively at all areas of our life. I don’t in any way believe that pure Mormonism has an aversion to open inquiry, my view is that it’s quite the opposite – even though our culture may at times indicate otherwise.

Criticism that seeks learning and truth is healthy. I think a lot of today’s society is criticism to protect one’s own views or to just tear down others’, not to learn new ones, and that is not as healthy, IMO…In religion and politics, it seems people are sometimes more interested in winning the debate than in uncovering new ideas.

Exactly, some of these atheist crusaders need to realize that people don’t want to hear it. If they really wanted to have a meaningful discussion then maybe more people would listen but it looks like many of them would rather just agitate and stir up controversy by focusing on stereotypes like pedophile priests and how they think that religion is stupid and that God is imaginary just like fairies or unicorns. Why are they so surprised when people call them out on their intolerant bigotry? I agree that religions shouldn’t just get a free pass to say whatever they want without ever being criticized or questioned but some of these militant atheists are not really helping the situation with their disrespectful rhetoric.

To me, the tone of this article says more about the author and his bias than it does about the supposed sad state of the American public compared to Europe and Japan. For example, he talks about religious beliefs using many loaded terms like irrational, denial, ignorance, absurd, and myth and he laments how “unfortunate” it is that more Americans don’t believe in evolution. Well why exactly is it so important for the majority of people to believe in evolution to begin with? Most practical applied science such as medicine and engineering is not really dependent on knowing much about evolution. The real reason they think evolution is so important is mostly because they want to try to equate “science” with atheism and most of all I think they want to see more atheists in America because of politics.

In my case, I already believe in evolution and the big bang but I would still never be an atheist. In fact, for many people the big bang actually supports religious beliefs because they think God is the “First Cause” and that “Goddidit” is still a better explanation for the reason why the physical constants happen to support life than alternative explanations like the idea of multiple universes and the Anthropic Principle.

Even if we assume that all religion is based on false beliefs it does not follow that it must therefore also be relatively “dangerous” or harmful on average compared to no religion. Personally I think some religious beliefs are typically good for people and society whether God exists or not. My guess is that telling people they are no better than animals and that there is no afterlife is potentially far more dangerous than believing that Jesus is alive ever will be in most cases regardless of what actually turns out to be true or not. Look at the results produced by some of the worst atheist communists before you start jumping to conclusions about how getting rid of religion will supposedly make the world a better place.

Religion has to be open to criticism, which I see as the need to adapt to the context of the world around it. By that, I mean religion HAS to provide useful tools to make meaning with what people find in their world. A religion that resists adapting to the world around it will be “selected out of the gene pool,” to use a term from evolution.

….Just last Sunday, I was listening to people getting themselves all whipped up into a frenzy against the internet…Why not instead adapt to it (in a positive way), instead of somehow trying to deny and suppress it.

That would be nice if more religious believers and leaders were more open to the idea of embracing the truth whatever it turns out to be rather than being content to just ignore or deny any credible evidence that doesn’t support their claims and assumptions. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to see this kind of attitude prevail. The problem with the “evolution” of religion is that it can be a painfully slow process especially when we are dealing with people that value tradition and the written word over popular opinions. Suppose some religious leaders don’t change anything and basically try to completely deny reality and abuse people’s trust. In that case, just how long would it really take for a religion with millions of followers to actually go extinct? My guess is that it would probably take at least several generations and possibly much longer than that.

For all the scientific discoveries and advances, the theory of evolution is still almost like the atheist gospel even though it has been around since 1859. Until then people could look around and it seemed like plants and animals had to be created by an intelligent designer but this made it much more believable to claim that everything could have just happened by chance. Not only has this theory been fairly well-known for a long time but we also have evidence that modern humans were already around long before Adam supposedly showed up in a fairly civilized state. Meanwhile, the Bible says that Adam was the first man and religions that interpret this literally have continued to thrive because many people don’t know about this contradictory evidence, don’t believe it, or else they don’t really care. Others have made some complicated rationalizations to try to fit the evidence with the Bible story.

If they’ve been ignoring or denying this kind of evidence for this long what’s going to stop them from doing the same thing for another 50 years or more? Not only does the LDS Church have to deal with contradictory scientific evidence but some of the most effective anti-Mormon propaganda on the internet also includes historical information, cult accusations, and internal contradictions often pointed out by equally dogmatic fundamentalist Christian Bible thumpers. It’s almost like the LDS Church is being challenged from all sides but at the same time it seems like the majority of active TBMs are mostly oblivious to this and likely to deny any apparent weakness in the Church’s claims. This is why I don’t think the LDS Church is in any real hurry to really open things up to the light of day or be more flexible about their doctrines because they’ve had so much success doing things the same way they always have.