Nope. Can’t do it.

Welcome back, BoF. This was an incredibly brave thing to do. You went into the lions den. From the (continued high) quality of your writing, I assume you came out with your intellect intact.

I wish I could quote and note who said this correctly, as I read this a while back and I’m having a hard time trying to find out where I got the info. But on another atheist message board I found a link to an interesting article about how modern science is in part, to blame for the rise in fundementalism. Good science is a literal interpetation of the data, and science in turn has shifted the logic paradigm in religion from a system of attaining meaning from the abstract and sybolic to a literal interpetation of the data, so to speak. It is an interesting theory, and if I can find this article I’ll post it here.

But it still doesn’t explain how some fundies can pull stuff out of there ass in certain biblical translations

Nah. That’s what they want you to think. It’s good to be a bullshit artist with an invisible friend who’s a bigger badass than the alpha ape. Cuts you right in for a piece of the political pie, with gravy and all the trimmings.

In addition to social order, religion explains the unexplanable. It really wasn’t until very recently (less than 1000 years – drop in the bucket in evolutionary terms) that humans had enough scientific knowledge that even something as well studied as lightning wasn’t just “the gods be mad!”

But even on this tiny time scale, it’s easy to see how fundamentalism actually promotes greater populations of their own. Just look at the Family That Shall Not Be Named™. They are extremely fundamentalist and have a very large number of offspring. Look at Catholicism. Same dealio.

You can’t take these examples and extrapolate them out on longer time scales, as far as our actual species’ genetic evolution is concerned. However, you can see how in a few generations, despite education and science, it is difficult to overcome old superstitions by sheer increase in the offspring of the ignorant! They replace the evil secular converted very quickly. And despite that, are losing membership! How about them apples??

Islam is on the rise in Europe due to immigration, and Christianity in China because of evangelization.

This is true of the USSR, but more recently in China and Europe where Christianity and Islam (respectively) are increasing at rapid rates.

Christianity is not “increasing” in Europe; it’s been in a state of decline for decades.

If theism is stupidity how do you explain its historic and modern proliferance in spite of evolution’s best effort to education and irradicate it?

Evolution is just a process. It doesn’t care one way or the other whether humans believe in a god.

Why would an evolving species cling to something that does not aid in its survival?

Religion is a very recent invention, just a few thousand years old. It had no effect at all upon the evolution of Homo sapiens until about 14,000 years ago. After that, you could easily argue, it has been trying hard to wipe us out. Given that WWIII is probably inevitable and is guaranteed to start in the Middle East, religion is clearly non-advantageous.

If you want to only look at everything up to this point, ignoring future possibilities, religion served a valuable role in the social development of our species.

Early humans lived in small family groups. It was difficult for larger groups to stay together. Despite the huge advantages that greater numbers provide, there are too many people with conflicting interests to hold the group together. What you need is a strong outside (or perceived to be outside) force to unify the group. Religion provides that force. The witch doctor or priest could claim to be the interpreter of what the gods want. If anybody gets out of line, he is threatened with the wrath of god.

Works great.

Until conflicting tribes (nations) meet, each convinced that god is on their side.

And they have nuclear weapons.

Refresh my memory, why is science a threat to religion? It doesn’t specifically disagree, it would be ridiculous to assume that a “day” to an eternal being is the same as the rotational period of the planet that wasn’t even done yet when he was building it

These are young-Earth creationists we’re talking about. For some reason, their whole personal identity is dependent on the world being 6000 years old. If they were forced to realize that it wasn’t, they’d go insaner.

And then we could all get along, and they could be a LOT more honest than they’re being now. And isn’t being more honest good, and isn’t being good what their god wants? They could put all that time, effort, and energy into feeding the hungry or caring for the sick or knitting sweaters for homeless puppies.