Out of body religious experiences

[TomOfSweden]

Organizing Religion into political (The pope, Divine Right of Kings, the Ayatollahs, etc) forces gives one man or a group of men the right to tell me what I must believe and not allowing me to believe what I want to. If you have one man or woman believing that I must kill you because you don't belive what I do, mean you have 1 or 2 fanatics. But one or woamn telling me to believe that thing, means I have a whole society telling me that you are an enemy fornot believing what I do.

Organizing religion is what has set religion against science. Again, if I am one person I have the right to look at evolution as a gift from my God. But if I am told by one stupid individual who wants power that It is a sin to believe in something that has so much proof behind it, then I have organized stupidity into science.

So I disagree totally that organization has made religion into a force for good, quite the contrary.

So by taking a couple of very extreme and abnormal examples of what organised religion can be you discount all of it. I personally think that we have most of our modern world to thank for scientific work made possible by religious institutions. In the olden days having time to do anything but survive was highly unusual.

Dawkins is just as much a fundamentalist (and to me, just as much an idiot) as Pat Robertson or that Falwell was. He is fanatical about claiming that there is no God, as those claiming there is only one way to look at God.

This proves to me that you haven't bothered listening to the man. So there's not much more for me to say. Fundamentalism to me means some sort of faith in spite of evidence.

O'hare I hadn't heard of and couldn't find anything on. Beside these I can't think of a single example of an atheist "fundamentalist".

Stupid-Ass guesswork (as you call it) is what got us that knowledge in the first place. A lot of our chemical concoctions came from Alchemist trying to turn lead into gold. Boy, that was a stupid-ass theory. But out of it came a lot of great knowledge about chemistry.

Either I misread you or you're confusing theory with faith.

It's a big difference going out on a limb if you're a scientist and it's within your field or if you're just a random dude. The last time a person who hadn't dedicated his entire life to science had a major break through was more than a 200 years ago. I can't think of a single specific example actually. The age of the gentleman scientist is definitely over.

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn dedicated his life to exploring this. Worth a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn