MadDog wrote:
Well, I just find all the evidence we have hilarious in many ways. We haven't even successfully gotten a person to Mars, yet we have the center of the universe figured pretty good! Don't get me wrong. Maby we do indeed have it all figured out based on what little evidence we have been able to collect in the past...what?...80 years or so? My only beef is that it is called the Big Bang Theory and not the Big Bang Fact for a reason. There is some evidence to support, but more research needs to be done. Just another kind of faith at this point. Luckily we are all allowed to believe whatever we wish (assuming we don't live in a Theocracy, or a place where you call your fellows 'comrad').
The fact that we know a lot more than we did 80 years ago is irrelevant to the veracity of the data itself. All it means is that there's a good chance we have a lot more to learn, which is good, because the day we know everything is the day scientists stop doing science.
As for Big Bang Theory vs. Big Bang "Fact", you can blame this on your lack of scientific literacy I'm afraid. A theory in science is actually of a higher order than a fact. That's why it's the "theory of evolution by natural selection", or the "heliocentric theory", or "atomic theory", or whatever. A theory in science is a concept which units many distinct facts and describes something significant through interpretation of a wide body of evidence. So a theory is actually comprised of many individual facts, but it turns those facts into a coherent idea. So the fact that we can detect the cosmic background radiation and it illustrates a universe expanding from a big explosion 14.5 billion years ago is an interesting fact on its own, but it and others is used to describe the origin of the universe as we see it in the big bang theory.
You're right though, more research is needed. We know how the planets and stars and so on got here, the shape of the universe, and how the universe will end, but just imagine what we'll know in another 80 years.
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Well, yes and no. Religion does not kill people. People who cannot accept that any view that is not exactly their own could possibly be valid do the killing. There are fanatics in politics as well.
I think it's true that religion by itself usually isn't something that can make people kill for the most part. Certainly there are exceptions, but overall it's not solely responsible for a lot of stuff. However, it is true in a variety of cases that religion is why certain acts of evil are performed. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were religiously motivated. Those men would not have woken up that morning and figured it was a good day to slit the throats of some stewardesses and then fly into a building at 400 mph if their religion didn't say that jihad in defense of the religion is a noble act and people who die in the act of defending Islam are rewarded in paradise. That's really all there is to say about it. The hijackers were all educated, many with PhDs, were middle class or better, and could have lived very pleasant lives if they wanted to. But they felt their duty to kill civilians and die in the process because their god told them to was more important.
The thing I'd say about religion and its influence upon people is that, while it may not make the average person do bad things (besides bigotry in the US and elsewhere against gay people and stuff like that) it certainly doesn't make people behave any better, either. For all the nice stories in the Bible, Christians are no more moral than non-religious people. In fact, if you take a look at the more irreligious nations in the world, they're also some of the nations with the lowest crime rates. Conversely, the USA had a highly religious population, and also has the largest prison populations in the world. And prisoners are overwhelmingly religious, meanwhile, people who are not religious have relatively a very low rate of incarceration.
Obviously there are other factors at work here, but as someone who isn't religious, it's this kind of hypocrisy that bothers me the most about Christians here in Canada where I live and elsewhere. In university I took some anthropology courses, and I've gotta say that comparing mainstream Christians with groups like the Amish makes me a bit sad. The Amish and other anabaptist sects are the ones who actually care about the Bible's contents in a real way. They don't just talk the talk, they toil the land, they live humble lives, they are really what I think any sensible Christian should probably be envious about. Reading the Bible and all that Jesus had to say, I cannot believe that Christianity has morphed into this decadent, greedy religion that is as un-Christ-like as you can get. Compared to the Amish, who farm and raise families and love their wives and praise their god, the religion of the megachurches, the hating of homosexuals, the "god told us to invade Iraq", is a hideous parody of what that Jesus fellow may or may not have said at some point.
