[TheSkronkDonkey]

Superstition is gussied up fear and religion is gussied up superstition. Much art and beauty has emerged from religious thought and religious belief, but that still doesn't change the fact that religion is nothing more than the enshrinement and elevation of ignorance to the detriment and abandonment of logic, rationality, empiricism and true ethics. The need is human, the transgression is human, the perceived patterns of divinity are human-made -- on this basis, and only this basis, religion commands respect. However ...

If something divine exists, it must surely exist beyond all patterns. Time and again, human beings have made gross errors of judgment, founded on fear, fostered by ignorance, from believing that epilepsy was a sign of divine madness, to the Earth being at the centre of the universe, to comets being flaming swords, beards, jars, chariots, even the sum of all human sins, to deformity and disease a sign of a god's wrath or proof of evil spirits, to the idea that the universe emerged in a puff of smoke or that everything was created in six thousand years, that planets were birthed before stars, that plants functioned without sunlight and so on.

In the past 500 years, especially the last 150, science has made religion look like the colossally flawed interpretation of reality that it is. And it has done this not by attacking religion, but ignoring its tenets and sticking to its own, discovering things that no-one in their wildest imaginings could have believed. Science shames human imagination and makes us look like the feeble, dull-minded, dull-sensing species we are. Apart from by maintaining a bizarre, dissonant and downright solipsistic state of mind, I fail to see how anyone who is truly familiar with the progress of knowledge -- HOW it's been acquired and WHAT has been acquired -- just in the past few centuries could possibly maintain sincere faith in any system that requires belief in anything but evidence.

With science, we can determine what is sensible and what is not, we can improve and grow, we can build better technology, better societies, better ways of living, and a road to the stars; with religion, we lock ourselves away from the world, from its beauty and its horror, from the true scope of human suffering, from the true nature of what being human is, has been, will be and could be.