Living the life scientific

I'm enjoying engaging with someone who considers themselves to be an atheist at the moment. What makes it more fun is that they appear to have bought into the whole 'anti God - anti faith - anti religion' thing with a vengeance and assume that all the world's evils come from having a belief in something. Fun? Yes indeedy folks because their belief in things scientific!

It's quite amusing in that they consistently mock those who believe as the source of death, destruction and fundamentalism and put forward the idea that science is all about 'fact' and 'logic' and is the only rational way for mankind to be. In fact, science will eventually lead to the demise of religion as people come to see that it is only in science that mankind can be both saved and directed.

Now that sounds like a religion to me!

'Of course,' they tell me, 'science never killed anyone; it was religious people who did the killing. Science may have provided the means for the killing but it is pure and above the religious fanaticism that actually did the deed!'

Now this keeping one's hands clean is understandable and yet I find many cases where logic and rational thinking, separated from any idea of a religious influence or use, has brought about the death of many.

The other side of the coin is that whilst those who embrace a purely rational scientific faith have their outcomes and advances, it is more often than not the faith groups who are out their being altruistic in the many relief works and agencies. Thus we find the reality that religion is, like the Curate's egg, something in which 'not all of it is bad' and we can also see that not all of those things scientific are good either.

I'm going to have an attempt to dialogue with the new atheist issue - not because I want a fight but because I want to understand where they have a point (and some points are indeed valid) and where they have merely left their brains at the doorpost and believed blindly the modern prophets and purveyors of flawed logic and bitter misrepresentation.

So, let us reason together (for that is what Christian do - reason). Blind faith is as the name implies 'blind' and of little use to anyone!'

Pax