Debate: Would you sooner let your faith rest with science or God?
Side: Science

sermon #3Religion vs The ColonelWtf? If this is a joke, I'm not getting it. (Obviously you're referencing the video, but why is this a sermon?).Clearly you believe religion suppresses individual thoughtClose, organized religion.and as such you advocate getting rid of it as a solutionBy not advocating the violent overthrow of religion, you implicitly advocate the non-violent overthrow of religionI advocate encouraging people to think for themselves. In my own humble opinion I believe that this will lead to the downfall of organized religion, because people will begin to question assumptions that have led them to follow the unfounded beliefs of those around them. The term "overthrow" is a poor one, because I am not forcing anything on anyone, nor is the effort organized in any way. This is merely the call to tell people to use their brains. If their conclusion after doing so leads to a renewed faith in religion, then so be it, but in the long run I suspect that this will not be the case.To overthrow religion would suppress individual thought, destroy religious thought and ideas; both good and bad, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.Here is where I disagree. Allow me to first repeat that I am not saying anything should be forced on anyone, and therefore you cannot argue that I am suppressing individual thought. Secondly, I am not positive what you mean exactly by "religious thought" but I can only think of two guesses:1. You mean thought that creates dogma out of old ideas, and isolates and punishes those who reject this thought.2. You mean the teachings and lessons that exist in the various holy books.If you mean the former, then I must say, good riddance. If instead you believe the former, then let me once again point out that you're wrong. I'll quote part of an argument I had in a different debate: Don't misunderstand me here; I believe that many important lessons can be gleamed from the various religious texts that exist in our world. Taking these lessons as literal unquestionable dogma however, is harmful in many ways, because it limits the creative intellectual discussions that have allowed our species to progress to the point where we are today.I think that religious texts certainly have a legitimate intellectual value, and should be looked at like we look at all great literary works. This value is diminished, however, if we cannot talk openly about both the negative and positive lessons in these texts. Try going into a church, for example and arguing that a certain part of the Bible is wrong on some moral issue. You'll find that you aren't received very well. It is this stifling of thought that I would like people to be free from.You'll find that the majority of America's founding fathers agreed with me. Jefferson went through the entire Bible, in fact, and cut out the sections he thought didn't belong. That copy is still sitting in congress today. He understood that there were both good and bad parts of the Bible, but that it is through rational thought that we would distinguish the two; not unquestioning organized dogmatic belief.Why is it that when people act badly, you blame religion, but when people act in a good way, religion gets no credit.Off the top of my head I can think of numerous examples where religion deserves credit for convincing people to do good. For the example of the Huguenots I merely used your own words to show that religion was clearly not the only motivation, and in fact, probably not the primary motivator.If you believe that "religion can convince good people to do bad things", then you must also accept that religion can also convince people to do good things too.Here is where I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of my argument so allow me to clarify in as simple terms as possible for you.Someone who is doing something with religious motivation is, by definition, doing something that they believe to be good. However, whether what they are doing is actually good is purely dependent upon the teachings of whatever religion they belong to. This means that they could be doing something good, benign, or possibly harmful. Essentially they are putting all their trust into the fact that their religion is right, and their actions are "good."Contrast this to a world without religion. You would have the same people who would be religious, and trying to do good, except this time their actions would be determined by their own individual thoughts, and what makes sense rationally: not something said in a 2000 year old book. Obviously, if these people had bought into some other ideology (nationalism, for example) then they would be in more or less the same place they were if they were religious, however, religion would not be there to cloud their thoughts.Not all religion is the same, and not all religion is all bad all the time. There is no need to start a war against religion.You seem to love painting me as some type of extremist. Is it easier to argue against me when you create a strawman, and misrepresent my arguments and ideas? If you object to radical Islam or any other harmful ideology, then resist that particular ideology,... don't make the leap of generality and denounce ALL religion. That's like denouncing all chicken just cuz you got sick once from a bucket of KFC.Here you try and make the point that those religions that contain extremists are the exceptions, but I would argue that they are the rules. To use a similar analogy: That's like praising the usefulness of dirty hypodermic needles you found on the street, just because you used one that didn't give you a disease.Religions tend to attract extremists. All ideologies do. The difference with religion is that these people think that they are saving people, and will be rewarded in heaven. It's tough to convince someone not to do something, if they think that it will get them into heaven, or conversely send them to Hell if they don't do it. In addition, it's not just Islam. There are still Christians today who believe that witches are real, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much Christian fundamentalists have hampered the U.S. education system in their attacks against evolution. In fact, check out this graph. Look where the U.S. is: at the bottom of the graph right in front of Turkey. This is because both the U.S. and Turkey have large percentages of the population that are strongly religious. If you were ever wondering why the U.S. is falling behind other industrialized nations when it comes to jobs in the scientific world, look no further.Talk about blasphemy.Okay I will. Blasphemy is a pretty good summary of what I don't like about religion. If someone says something a Church doesn't like, they accuse them of blasphemy. That suppresses thought. Suppressing thought = Bad