telling us science says there is no god, always did seem pretty petty and missing the point to me. Religion is more than about whether or not the is a god, I think.
Absolutely. And really, all science can do is comment on individual specific religious claims, and normally the less important ones (the age of the earth isn't actually the core tenet of christianity etc)
Also, I'm not sure anyone actually uses science as a religion. People may try to act in a rational way, but logic still has to work from some sort of arbitrary principles, and you have to choose those somehow. I used to hang out with lots of atheists, and there were all sorts of different ethical/political etc belief systems, about the only thing they had in common was a tendency not to be super conservative about stuff like sex.
There are certain atheistic dogmas which claim to be the One True Atheism, but they're all diametrically opposed to each other :) My grandma is a communist, and I've encountered lots of very obnoxious capitalist libertarians, so I understand the "If that's atheism count me out" reaction. I used to refuse to call myself an atheist for that reason, but eventually decided I wasn't going to let them tell me what "atheist" meant. (I mean if it doesn't mean you fair enough, but I don't like the way the word gets coopted by the extremists)
I also have an intense dislike of people saying things like relgion has never done any good for the world
Me also. You can argue over whether or not it's done more harm than good (personally I think it's too hard to disentangle it from culture to say) but it's definitely done some good.
Re: I'm really out of it, so hopefully this makes sense.
Absolutely. And really, all science can do is comment on individual specific religious claims, and normally the less important ones (the age of the earth isn't actually the core tenet of christianity etc)
Also, I'm not sure anyone actually uses science as a religion. People may try to act in a rational way, but logic still has to work from some sort of arbitrary principles, and you have to choose those somehow. I used to hang out with lots of atheists, and there were all sorts of different ethical/political etc belief systems, about the only thing they had in common was a tendency not to be super conservative about stuff like sex.
There are certain atheistic dogmas which claim to be the One True Atheism, but they're all diametrically opposed to each other :) My grandma is a communist, and I've encountered lots of very obnoxious capitalist libertarians, so I understand the "If that's atheism count me out" reaction. I used to refuse to call myself an atheist for that reason, but eventually decided I wasn't going to let them tell me what "atheist" meant. (I mean if it doesn't mean you fair enough, but I don't like the way the word gets coopted by the extremists)
I also have an intense dislike of people saying things like relgion has never done any good for the world
Me also. You can argue over whether or not it's done more harm than good (personally I think it's too hard to disentangle it from culture to say) but it's definitely done some good.