Religion is not the opposite of science.  Science is not something to BELIEVE in: it is a method for understanding and describing the objective universe.

I would agree with the first statement, and disagree with the latter.

Science is the belief system of this last couple thousand years (give or take, depending on where on the planet you look at it.) It causes people to say with a strait face

It [scientific method] is the known method that most reliably weeds out wrong inferences and theories.  And that is an empirically supported statement. Migeru-Dec 24th, 2007

It reminds me that there are hundreds of thousands of movies and songs that are pure dreck, yet we remember the classics of the [50's, 60's, or 1720's, 1780's] with fond regard as if that is all their are.

Science and the scientific method have had billions of wrong forks, some of them quite consequential (like the eugenics party thrown as part of WWII.)

But the belief system says and relies upon and proves that in the end, we know (or, will know) ____. Empirically.

Perhaps it is true. And, perhaps it (the method) will be scoffed at in a few hundred years like the previous methods are scoffed at today. It certainly only says that given enough time, (enough weedkillers of wrong inferences and theories that have to be worked through) some things will work out right, and if you throw enough time and energy at a situation, (and enough people to experiment upon in some cases) perhaps (if the background information is straight and the technology and mentality of the time is ready) that a slice of truth will be dusted off and put on a shelf as understood, usable in another context, and often, available to slap others with.

That spirituality has sometimes progressed and slid in a similar manner in the last several thousand years, sometimes (often???) used to slap others with, well, I don't have to be an apologist for Saddam Hussein and religion in the same decade. But it can be done, in the same way that I am certain that [any clever person] is able to parse their own statement and find them as false as they are true.


If it were only as bad as 1984.