Count wrote:I would like to end the days of me being mean to people online needlessly
Who are you, and what have you done with Count Arioch?
Count wrote:
But, does that give us both the right to lord it over others?
Does that mean that we need to force it right down everyone's throats?
Of course it is. In fact, it's not simply OK, it is a moral imperative that we do so.
Unlike religions, which claim to give perfectly knowable Truth, science makes the much more modest claim of giving us a "best guess" given the results of our investigations. A month from now, some of the ideas I currently accept will be (at least seemingly) disproven, and I shall adjust my beliefs accordingly. Religions don't do that, and that makes them bad. Bad for people, bad for the world.
See, there
are ideas that are good for people, and ideas hat are bad for people. It is the clear intention of science to critically consider all of our ideas and
throw out the ones that cause us harm. Religions do not. They not only persist in believing ideas that harm us, they actively spread those beliefs to others.
Whether it is the 7th Day Adventist refusal to admit vaccines into their body (an act which jeopardizes the health of every man, woman, and child on Earth and almost guarantees the creation of a steady reserve of powerfully antibiotic resistant diseases in the future that shall someday cause plagues that will lay waste to continents), the Islamic refusal to allow Law to move forward into the eleventh century, or the fundamental Christian tenet that you can get away with
anything by committing a ritual blood drinking ceremony properly – these religions have ideas that harm us as a people and boththe religion as a whole and the brainwashed adherents thereof
refuse to critically examine them or assist in their removal.
We do ourselves no favors by pretending that ideas are of equal merit. Just as not every position is of equal merit in a game, it is equally true that believing in giant sky hands simply is not as efficacious as believing in The Germ Theory of Disease, Evolution, Electrodynamics, or the Water Cycle. Allowing people to persist in believing that electricity is made in plugs is doing them no favors. It's dangerous to have people living in modern society that don't understand how electricity is produced and conducted into their homes. And it's dangerous to have people believe in "souls" that they can't detect, because sometimes those people decide to pull an Eric Rudolph and kill people in an attempt to
protect those undetectable things that they have decided reside… wherever they decide those things reside.
Belief in things that does not make sense is
bad. For everyone. And you are failing those around you, yourself, and future generations by not doing your part to make the world better.
Tolerance is a virtue of sorts, but ideas also evolve. People die, and the knowledge they carry dies with them. But knowledge can also be passed down from person to person. It's even better than DNA, because you can pass knowledge to your brother, or your fifth cousin, or someone whose last common ancestor with you lived thirty thousand years ago in Africa. But if you don't pass it on, other ideas will take their place. Stupid, dangerous,
intolerant ideas. By allowing people to believe whatever they want, you are really simply allowing harm to fester and grow.
If you don't tell people,
show people how condoms work, the Catholic Church will claim that they spread AIDS and that Africans shouldn't use them (killing tens of millions of people). If you don't show people how water sanitization works, Muslims will fill that void with the idea that all disease is the Will of Allah and people will drink water exposed to their own waste and Cholera will spread in Pakistan (killing thousands each time).
Stopping these hurtful ideas from spreading themselves is not something that you have to even contemplate whether it is your "right" to do. No, the question you should ask yourself is whether you can live with yourself if you fail to do your part in abolishing this madness.
The Age of Reason has broken through generations of faithfulness because it
works. The Islamic societies have failed utterly. The Christian theocracies have likewise failed. They have failed their people and they will nonetheless try to spread their poison to us. Even now there are movements to tear down our achievements and replace them with darkness and witch hunts. And these could succeed. Iran was overthrown by a socialist movement in the 70s and they were in turn overthrown by Islamic Fundies
with guns from Ronald Reagan. The Christians are so afraid of our godlessness that they
will promote repressive regimes that threaten to destroy the world will the holocaust of nuclear war. They've done it before, they'll do it again.
No, you do not have the right to spread scientific ideals and shed light into the hypocrisy and madness of the religious zealots. You have the
obligation to do so. Can you face the future generations and tell them that you sat idly by while the forces of irrationality brought back stoning and beheading? Will you be able to lift your head when you tell them that torture was brought back into war and you did nothing?
-Username17