izquierdista
izquierdista's JournalReligion lies beyond science
Religion always has an answer for any question, for the priests will consult with the deities and an idea will spring into their mind. Fortunately or unfortunately, science has no priesthood, and scientific answers to questions can be found by anyone willing to invest the time observing, collecting data, analyzing, computing, modeling, testing, and validating.
As time progresses, science builds upon itself, gradually enlarging the world of the known and explainable. When science proved that the Earth is a sphere that revolves around the sun, religion had to take a step back and erase the previous "revealed wisdom" from their inerrant texts and explain that there wasn't really any conflict between the two views. So it goes with any scientific advance, once the science is well established and can be accepted as a truth, religion says "well of course, it said so all along in our holy books".
Creationism doesn't damage science, it just denies it, which is what religions always do. When people tire of false answers that don't work, and they observe that the scientific answer does explain something, they are usually converted to the scientific viewpoint. If not, it just indicates that they haven't tired of the false answer that they were taught and have become secure in.
The further the horizon of science extends and the more it can explain, the further out God and religions are pushed, always living in the unknown.
No, you really can blame religion
What religions ALL have in common is a belief that knowledge is revealed (by a deity or authority figure), not learned by your own efforts. Take the question "why are some people gay?" The religious answer would be to go to the revealed wisdom (in this case Leviticus) where it says that to lie with another man would be an abomination and use that to guide your thinking. The scientific answer only comes after much more questioning and observation: are humans the only species to evidence homosexuality? Is it correlated with race, ethnicity, birth order, astrological sign, diet during the mother's pregnancy, sunspots, background radiation, being left-handed, lack of a father figure? Is there a genetic component? Is there an environmental component? Does it change over time? Can heterosexuals become homosexual and vice versa, or is there a third category that might be designated ambisexual? If it can change, what are the causal factors? What is the evolutionary advantage to homosexuality? Is it contagious? Scientists use math and statistics to quantify the answers to questions like these; religion has no use for mathematics as there is just a right and a wrong, no middle ground.
See, with religion, the answer is known by doctrine and revealed wisdom beforehand, and then what must be done is to fit the world to that view. Science takes the novel approach that ideas should be tailored to fit the world that is observed. I think if you divide your category of "all Jews" into very religious and non-religious, you will find that the former group is the one that is promoting the gay cure crock -- because of what their revealed wisdom tells them to do. And among the latter group, you will find scientists who are actually concerned with finding out what is true. Some of them might even be studying prejudice and how it can be explained.
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