Religion is predominately a positive for humanity

On to my last rebuttal. The fact you dispute evolution on a scientific basis is interesting. Most biologists would disagree with you, and the evidence for evolution is fairly blatant. This claim of tautology is just misplaced. The scientific field is built to oppose tautology. The most famous and most successful scientists are the ones who destroy old ideas and make room for new ones. A scientist wouldn’t get rich and famous for parading old ideas around. Don’t you think that if somebody had found legitimate evidence to disapprove evolution we would know about it? This example of the cave fish doesn’t make much sense either. If a fish has evolved, then it’s evolved. It shouldn’t matter how it evolved, if you can prove that over the years it has changed and adapted then that is the end of the argument. Evolution has taken its course. Thanks to things like the fossil record and things like vestigial legs in whales and so on, we can see evolution as it has taken place. Morality isn’t necessarily tied to Darwinian evolution. It could partly be more cultural. But let’s say it is Darwinian. For example, in this experiment monkeys were found to show fairly obvious signs of morality. (. http://www.ted.com...) It could be Darwinian; humans, as a species could have figured out long ago that keeping the wise old man healthy would be beneficial for the tribe, just as we would have figured out that condoning things like wanton murder and cannibalism and thievery and rape don’t generally lead to a prosperous tribe. Adolf Hitler, Roman Catholic. The German church condoned Hitler, even up until 1945. “You're just back to moral relativism, and the. .. " Absolutely right. Morality is relative, and it’s not a coincidence that this tribe in particular has moral standards that are at the very least fairly comparable to our own. I never argued that my brain is a product of random chance because that doesn’t make any sense. It evolved as an organ over millions of years. It didn’t just appear in my head (although, looking back at my life one could make a case that it did). The brain is still a mystery, and that’s pretty amazing. I don’t know about the independence of thought and free will because nobody knows about that. True, I can’t say that every single religious person is trapped in a church mindset, but a key difference between those who are religious and those who are not is that those who aren’t don’t feel the need to discuss all the ways they aren’t religious every Sunday. In my experience, bringing an atheistic message into a church is a great way to get yelled at. I can say that many of the people I went to church with were very much caught up in the ‘church’ mindset. “Do you give all of your discretionary income (ie post-tax, post-bills) to charities. .. " The point here is that Jesus’s message opposes the rich fairly clearly. Those who are rich should give some portion of it away. For a church to be rich seems even worse. Jesus wrecked a temple for condoning trading. What would he do if he walked into a laser show mega-church? It’s harder for the rich man to enter heaven, after all. “Nice quote of Warren Jeffs by the way - I'm sure that represents the general feeling. .. " I never said that was the general feeling of most religious people, and for you to paint me with that brush is insulting my intelligence. Do I really need to say that I don’t think most religious people believe that? The point was to show that communities can be incredibly destructive if they are left to fester. Whether or not you want to take my pamphlet line and again paint all religious organizations with it is up to you. I can tell you that when I went to Mexico on a mission trip we were encouraged to hand out not only pamphlets but also pocket bibles, which we had boxes of. Top charities - . http://www.forbes.com... If religion is so adept at spreading beliefs through community then why all the division? If religion provides us with a ‘true north’ then why can I talk to one Christian who is pro-death sentence, or pro-gay marriage, or whatever, and then talk to another in the same church who isn’t? Name five major issues where Religious people agree unanimously. They can’t even agree on what the bible means! Much less work as some kind of cohesive unit! -Nice logical proof :o)” Taking an introduction to a series of logical points and passing it off as some kind of singular message is disingenuous to my argument. I went on to explain why. Appealing to emotions again. By what actual logic can you declare God "psychopathic", and place yourself as morally "superior"? It’s interesting to note that whenever I bring up this kind of proof you say I’m “appealing to emotions”. It’s a logical point, and you should address it as such. Is it not logical to think that evaporating a city is not the ideal way to fix community problems? It seems logical to me. If we don’t like Compton, that’s fine, but let’s not nuke it just because it’s not an ideal community. Maybe we should do it, after all, if god is perfect than we should follow in his example. Is that not logical? This goes into your notion of ‘free will’. It’s not free will if god knows how it’s going to end, and the bible clearly states that he does know how it’s going to end. If god created me, then he knows the choices I’m going to make, and he knows where I’ll end up. So why not swoop in and save me? Why not make himself known? I gave you several arguments as to why I think there is no ‘true north’. Demanding an argument is just silly. Go back to evolutionary morality. Go back to the tyrannical god we claim gave us the rules. Remember that the Christian god didn’t and still doesn’t reign supreme over most of the world. We’ve got plenty of Muslims and Jews and Hindu that all have different cultures and thoughts on morality. Why must you persist with this random-by-product nonsense? If a man and a woman have a child then they are compelled by evolutionary motives to protect their child. It is logical that if a mother loses her child she will suffer, emotionally, and the case could easily be made that she feels so strongly about her child because evolutionarily as a species we have a long history of losing children at a young age. There was a time when having lots of children was important because we were threatened with dying out. If you were the leader of a tribe and you were starving to death I would expect you to do what is necessary to survive as a whole. It’s not pretty, but if it came to one death versus twenty deaths, wouldn’t you take it? It’s been done before. The religious people might starve to death, but we would survive. Religion might have its benefits, but there is nothing that religion can do for humanity that we couldn’t do without it. Therefore, if you take the bad stuff religious dogmatism encourages, it’s easy to see why we should discard it. Pro can’t prove that religion has worked primarily as a positive in the past, and he can’t prove that it provides a ‘true north’, because not only have people survived fine without a religious text, but even if we did use a religious text like the bible, every Christian picks and chooses parts they like and disregards the stuff they don’t like. The same goes for most religions. What we might call a good Muslim is in fact a Muslim that disregards the violent verses in the Quran that condone death for apostates or condone jihad. So the fact remains, if we pick and choose, then what is really driving our moral compass. Why wouldn’t we just take it all literally like some of our ancestors did? Why not just act like the so-called perfect god in every instance of our life? Because we don’t get our moral compass from the bible, or the Quran.