ginof wrote:

KayR wrote:Churches haven't yet figured out how to deal with a science-based culture like we have today.

Respectfully, I think some Churches do a pretty good job of embracing science based information. The ones that do so have given up their dogmatic past and expect that what we know about the world changes. I'm thinking of the more humanist based ones like Ethical Culture, Untiarian Universalism and others. My guess is that your comment was really focused on the more main stream religions, but I wanted to point out that they are not ALL like that.

Just ruminating on that beautiful Freudian slip - 'untiarian'. Does that mean people who untie the bonds of past delusion?

But seriously, I think religion has a long way to go to become scientific. Fantasy is so hardwired in at the centre of faith that clear analysis is beset by rampant prejudice on all sides.

The best example in my view is the existence of Jesus Christ. People simply cannot imagine psychological delusion on the scale required to invent Jesus, but the available evidence, for example the apparent non-existence of Nazareth until after about 50 AD, indicates that fictional invention is the most plausible scientific hypothesis for the emergence of the Gospels.

The level of fantasy in religion is a continuum from Mormonism and other traditional creationist dreams at one end, through liberal faith in the middle, to scientific atheism at the other end. This problem of assessing religious faith by scientific methods is a fertile field for research, especially in regard to seeing the role of shared stories in building community.

KayR wrote:
Well, the Pope excommunicated Galileo--facts have always been given short shrift when they get in the way of theology

And not just the Pope; many othe denominations attack science and rational thought as well. Pat Robertson recently said that God works miracles in Africa but not America, because the Africans have not been contaminated by science, and will believe in them (miracles). And here in my own state (Texas), about one and one-half hour's drive southwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, near the town of Glen Rose, lies Dinosaur Valley State Park, with some of the best fossil footprints ever found. Just outside the park (on private property), is the Creation Science Museum, with its displays that "prove" that evolution is a fallacy, and that man and the dinosaurs co-existed.

nonsence

zerig wrote:nonsence

Hello zerig. That is a magnificent first post. Did you know that nonsense is spelled with two s's? What are you talking about?