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O.T - Religion & Climbing Poll. 5-Dec-2009 At 6:24:21 AM evanbb

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On 4/12/2009 foreverabumbly wrote:

>but if you cant define spiritual things using scientific processes then
>how are you able to demonstrate areas that they dont exist?

No one is trying to disprove spiritual things; which would largely be personal experience. But scientists/science is always trying to describe phenomena accurately. So it's not a war, but scientists want to keep knowing new things and religion and spirituality is the opposite of that; belief in the unknowable.

So as science and religion have wandered along together over the years, scientific knowledge has slowly chipped away at describing the world around; so the unknowable bits get smaller and smaller. The Bible contains descriptions that can determine the age of the Earth. Who in 4000BC would have known how to calculate the age of the Earth? So this was considered unknowable and became an article of faith. Then someone got a good handle on optics and entropy and seriously challenged the long held ideas.

There have been long periods too when Christian religious bodies have actively suppressed science, for exactly the reason above. The more science knows the less the Church have to play with. I'd be interested to know how Islam and science went back in the day, I think there were some pretty serious mathematicians in early Islam.

Personally, I think religious bodies are completely absurd, deeply hypocritical and self serving. But, I think Jesus was probably a pretty awesome guy and had lots of excellent ideas about how people should be nice to each other. Do unto others is a pretty good start for an ethics system. The Church and the lunatics who have run it over the years have made up other rules as they went along to serve their own purposes. It does my head in how followers have stopped following the religion and started following the institution.