I know a lot of people here disagree with my point of view on this issue, but, hopefully I still have a target audience somewhere on this site. Babies deserve to die.

No, wait, different issue.

I've always been a big fan of science, and I tried a lot of times to decide why I believed in scientific findings almost unquestioningly, while I just as passionately dismiss religious or spiritual ones. It's a trickier topic than it seems. With that said, here are my current thoughts on that and related topics.

There's really only one thing that separates truly scientific claims from truly spiritual claims, and that is the requirement that scientific claims be falsifiable. What this means, in case you don't know, is that in order for any conclusion to be considered scientific, it must be possible to construct some experiment which could contradict the conclusion if it was actually false. An example of a falsifiable claim would be something like "every time you throw a rock in to the air from the Earth's surface at less than five miles per hour, it will return to the Earth." If this conclusion was false it could be shown easily by throwing a rock in to the air over and over again and seeing if it would stay there. A non-falsifiable claim would be something like "every time I'm alone and nobody can see me an invisible unicorn spits invisible saliva in my face." There's no way to prove that this is false, because if you ever look to see if it's happening, you ruin the experiment. An equally non-falsifiable claim would be something like "God exists, because I can feel him in my soul, and if he allows his divine light to enter your soul, you'll feel him also. If you don't feel him though, that just means you aren't filled with the divine spirit."

There are huge advantages to requiring beliefs to be falsifiable. For one, nearly everyone can be convinced to believe falsifiable claims if the have been tested thoroughly enough. It's not often that you'll find someone arguing with the laws of gravity or motion. It's for this reason that most scientific findings are accepted universally, while religious ones are constantly argued over and are completely different depending on who you talk to. That brings up what I think is the most important advantage to scientific claims, which is that they really can't be swayed by an individual's beliefs. I find it hard to trust any non-falsifiable claims because honestly people believe things that are wrong all the time. Especially when there is motive to, as there is in the case of religion. This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of religious thought. If, for some reason, I have motive to believe some non-falsifiable idea, there is absolutely nothing at all which can stop me from believing it, basically by definition. If I want to believe that an invisible unicorn spits invisible saliva which I can't feel on to my face when nobody's looking, what test could I possibly run to prove to myself otherwise? There is none. This is the case with most religions, and the motives for belief in those cases are actually understandable and predictable, (being raised to believe, wanting to be part of a social group, wanting some purpose in your life, needing to believe there's a point to all of us being here on Earth, wanting to believe that we don't just rot after we die, wanting to believe that there is a power greater than yourself which can turn around your misguided life, the list goes on) unlike in the unicorn example.

I think many religious and nonreligious people would agree with at least a lot of what I just said, but who knows, maybe not. Anyways, I have more.

There have been many many many religions in the past. As knivetsil said, he doesn't feel any need for his faith because science has given him most of the answers he needs, but as Stephen has said, that's not really what religion is, in theory, supposed to provide. The problem, however, is that (uneducated generalization time) basically every religion throughout history has included ideas which should have been left to science. Ferrick mentioned that we used to think lightning was an angry God, some people used to think that locusts showed up every 7 years because giant rock gods were letting them out of a cave that often, some people believed that their dancing could please the gods which would bring rain, some people believe that a human being came back to life a couple days after he died and made everybody lunch or something, some people believe that if you think hard enough a supreme being will make things happen that you ask for, some people believe the Earth was created in six days and that dinosaurs are fake. The reason for this, I think, is simply that people never believe a religion unless they have some actual verifiable evidence to make them choose it over others. The problem with all the old religions is that our knowledge and technology have advanced to a level at which we can see that the old religions were just making crap up, so while that crap may have been what brought them followers to begin with, it was also their downfall. Religions are really in a lot of cases scientific theories with a bunch of other spiritual stuff attached to them, like a congressman trying to pile a bunch of gun legislation on to a bill to increase education funding. When the scientific prediction fails, as most eventually do, nobody has any reason to believe the rest of the stuff that went with it anymore.

That's not to say science is completely innocent either. While in theory it is a completely objective measure of the truth, in practice it really isn't. There are many levels of subjective ideas creeping in to even the most basic scientific theories (and much more so in to the more complex ones), but I've written too much already and I think I can leave that for another post later, assuming anyone takes any interest in this one, and that it isn't deleted for some reason.

Also, I don't really think as badly of religions as it probably sounded like in this post. I can attack science and everything else almost as fully as I did religion, so it all kind of comes out in the wash.