perhaps it's not so much the god that matters but rather the belief itself....
Which many might do.
If someone acknowledges it is belief itself, in any god, that is important and not the god itself, that any god will do, that while there may be benefits to belief itself, gods don't really exist outsides one's head and don't really perform supernatural acts, then they are no longer religious in my book. I will be the first to admit that there may be benefits to beleiving in a god or gods - physcological, social benefits rooted in evolved brain and social behaviour - but belief in the power of belief is very different than actual belief in the supernatural. The placebo effect is very real. It is actual beleif in the supernatural I have a problem with.
Religions conflict with one another (and with science) because they proport different and conflicting frameworks for how the universe came to be and which god or gods are in charge, which should be worshiped and how, how to kill those who whorship the wrong gods and so on. If a monotheist acknowledges that another god is just as valid as their own, they have taken a huge step torwards secularism IMHO.
Your warm and fuzzy speculation that all religons may somehow be simply mutations of an original truth is interesting and there may be some value in it from a historical perpsective, but it does not add support for the existance of the supernatural. It mearly demonstrates the inventivness and creativity of humans. If you allow the possibility that all of the worlds religons have been modified and changed so dramatically from some root form through human invention, then why not acknowledge that religion itself may also be a product of the same inventivness?
If science is about removing the human component from our understanding of the universe (removing bias, superstition, etc.), religion is about understanding the universe through the human component.
I think that's crap. Religion is mythological hangover from the dark ages rooted in a time before we understood the way the universe actually works. It gets in the way of understanding the universe, it doesn't enhance it. People came up with religion as a way to explain and make sense of the world around them. Before Darwin, there was no competing theory for how life in it's many varied forms came to be. Before cosmology, there was no competing therory for the orgin of the universe or why the stars moved across the heavens. Religion was it. Until recently, religion was science.
Over the centuries, religon's domain has been erroded and largly supplanted from the outside by science. The world does not sit on a giant turtle or on Atlas's shoulders. The earth is 4.55 billiuon years old, not 6000. Humans evolved, they were not created in a garden. The modern interpretation of religion as simply a way to find personal meaning and understanding is a much diminished role, the last vestigages of a dying world framework. There is no need to believe in fairy tales to stand in awe of nature and the universe or to find personal meaning. Really, it's such a poor cousin to the truth.
What if I answer "I like to kill people" on your questionaire? Is that a moral or amoral act? How do you even begin to define "good" and "bad" in a purely scientific manner?
It's really easy actually. Morality is a function of social norms. Humans are social animals and the fact that we all share a set of general principles that one might term "morals" is because it's rooted in our genes. Killing others in your tribe for no reason generally resulted in your genes getting removed from the gene pool. Selection favorred certain behaviours and disfavorred others. You see the same thing in chimps, gorrillas, wolves and so on. There are norms of behaviour, often complex, often with cheaters, often with consequences for being caught cheating, often with a whole economy of behavioural practices. There is always genetic variablity, always the one guy that likes to kill people for no reason, but that person is a rare anomily. So, you use control groups, you use your questionaires to find a baseline across the population and then you test different demographic groups and look for corrolations. It's been done hundreds of times. This isn't hard. I'm surprised you find it so.
but at some point someone is going to have to make a judgement call about what is desirable and what is not. That's the realm of religion, philosophy, etc. Things that are definately not scientific..
I strongly disagree. As above, right and wrong, immoral and moral, these are social norms rooted in our genetics as highly complex social animals and as such as clearly within the domain of science.
Higher dimensions may or may not exist in any real sense, but they do not effect our normal, everyday life.
No argument here. If they did, we would have evolved intuition to better understand them.
Sept. 11 was about as much about religion as the crusades were: meaning only a flimsy pretense.
I did not say that Sept. 11 was about religion. I said that religon and specifically beleif in an afterlife allowed it to happen. Were there no belief in an afterlife, no promise of 70 virgins and so on, I claim it would have been harder to find intelligent, educated people (as the hijackers were) willing to willingly kill themsleves for whatever the cause. It would certainly not have been impossible. There are certainly many causes both religious and non-religious people would willingly die for, but religion tends to produce zelots in quanity like nothing else. Certainly suicide bombers capable of flying 767's might be harder to come by were there no beleif in an afterlife. (And yes I know many suicide bombers are misled and exploited).
People hide their hate behind religion because they're ignorant and stupid. Don't blame religion.
I don't. Religon has no monopoly on hate just as it has no monolpy on love or morality (all a function of brain chemsitry - a science BTW). There have certainly been atrocities perfromed in the name of religon and just as certainly there have been atrocities performed in the name of other agendas such as racism or facsism. The common thread is ignorance.
Islam certainly does not advocate military attacks on civilian targets.
There are those who would disagree with this. I'm no religious scholar, but from what I've read, the position that Islam is really a kind, gentle religion being misinterpreted by extremists may be wishful thinking. It really does say in the Koran that your duty as a muslim is to kill non-muslims.
people will act stupid and hateful regardless of what religion, belief, or philosophy the believe in (or don't).
Unfortuntly, I agree with this.
If anything, religion, belief, and philosophy are what prevents Man from being stupid and hateful all the time.
Surprisingly, I don't necessarily disagree with this. It could be true that belief in a god makes people better members of society on average but this lends no support to the actual existance of gods or the supernatural.
How easy would it be to fall in to a science-only world view, and adopt Social Darwinism as a guiding principle? How would that make you any better from someone who falls in to a religion-only world view and adopts I-don't-understand-that-it-must-be-magic guiding principle? Both views can cause so much harm.
I agree it does not take religion to do harm, but I'd rather live in a world where people use their brains and go through their life with the eyes open, beleiving what there is evidence to beleive and questioning beliefs in contradiction to evidence.