Thread by @Doc_0

The atheist conceit of a grand battle between the forces of sweet reason and benighted religious ignorance is so hilariously wrong-headed. The past few decades have demonstrated that pseudo-science is among the most militant, power-hungry, censorious, and zealous of faiths.

People who worship SCIENCE! are so easily tricked with appeals to authority. Their folly tends to be highly destructive, perhaps because they reflexively reject healthy wisdom they see as tainted with religious faith. They double down on failure instead of admitting error.

The Left's highly effective formula for demoralizing and wrecking healthy societies was developed by reversing everything that makes them healthy - and most of those healthy notions of marriage and family are embraced, endorsed, and sanctified by religions.

If you're hostile to everything "tainted" by religion - so you presume that all traditions and faith-based morality must be corrupt and wrong - you will easily be recruited into a crusade to tear down healthy society, especially if the crusaders pretend to be scientists.

In the course of dismissing religion as foolish superstition and rejecting all of its traditions and teachings, so many people became vulnerable to aggressive and malevolent secular authorities. Their lives are ordered by politicians who claim to speak for scientific consensus.

Categorically rejecting ideas is not logical or "scientific." The basic error of scientism is rejecting the possibility that it might be wrong about some deep aspects of the universe, of existence itself. This is an arrogance that cascades into other forms of closed-mindedness.

It also leads easily into greed, prejudice, and cruelty, and slides very naturally into authoritarianism. People who disagree with you are WRONG, and wrongness is intolerable. Everyone must obey the great consensus and those who speak for it. Only a few are qualified to disagree.

When people are convinced they are absolutely RIGHT, and their rightness is buttressed by science, they tend to disregard information that contradicts their convictions. Mix science with politics, and you get the exact opposite of the scientific method.

Of course, it doesn't help that every pseudo-scientific mistake and wrongheaded "consensus" embraced by secular politicians quickly accumulates a tidal wave of money behind it, so there is immense pressure to keep funding and enforcing failure, rather than admitting error.

You end up where we are today: a mega-state of total incompetence and stupidity, run by the biggest gang of idiots ever assembled, but they're all convinced they are geniuses who rule with the blessing of scientific consensus - and they'll burn any heretic who says different.

You don't need any religious faith to be friendly to it. You don't have to believe - you only have to admit you don't know all there is, so you can't disprove everything. A healthy little dose of humility, taken with a smile every morning, improves the quality of reason.

It is also unnecessary to share any religious faith to see the wisdom and compassion in religious teachings, or to understand that they get a lot of things right about how to encourage a healthy society - which makes sense, because healthy societies tend to spread their faith.

In other words, you can see how traditions would develop over time that encourage populations to grow in healthy ways and become prosperous - with some hideous mistakes along the way. Traditions have a vested interest in spreading themselves and attracting new adherents.

Perhaps most importantly for preserving healthy societies, there is an essential link between the concept of divinity and protecting individual freedom by limiting the power of the State, as America's founding documents so beautifully explain.

You don't have to believe in God to understand and embrace the concept of an authority greater than the State, which is absolutely necessary to accept that State power must have limits. The pyramid of power must be topped by either a question mark, or a very sharp point.

Accepting the importance of inalienable or God-given rights - given to us not by the indulgence of the State and its masters, but descending from an authority unreachably higher than theirs - is another healthy act of humility. Take that away, and cruel arrogance fills the void.

Religions have certainly done some awful things over the ages, but that usually happens when they lose THEIR vital humility and fuse with the State. For the most part, they care about individual people and human life more than callous pseudo-scientific "progressives."

I sure wouldn't have wanted to get the business from (either side) of the Crusades or Inquisition - but today I AM getting the business from greedy, callous, junk-science authoritarians who will tyrannize, impoverish, and kill huge numbers of people to reach their goals.

They've talked themselves into believing their absolute righteousness justifies unlimited deceit and cruelty. They need power to save the Earth and usher in sustainable Utopia, and anything they do to get that power is fair game. They silence all challenges to their convictions.

It takes humility to admit you might be wrong, to let others dissent and disobey, to accept that everyone has rights and responsibilities, to see how human laws and customs must adapt to a natural world we didn't create and do not control. Humility is faith's gift to reason. /end