TobiasBlack Wrote:the CIA used to test drugs on people without telling them in the 80's and no riots were had, people were too busy being hippies. the point of that thing is supposed to say that science has contributed more towards the advancement of human thought and society than religion has, in that religion is viewed in that context as a hindrance to development of the scientific process, which is far from the truth. people attribute religion to sitting in church and listening to an old guy in a robe stand up before a group of glass-eyed and bored people, prattling on about the stories of people long since decayed into worm fodder. religion and science used to go hand in hand, and some sciences were viewed as a religion in the past. not sure if alchemy can fall into that category, but its the first that comes to mind for some reason.
*shrug*
Religion has caused literally unmeasurable advances in the arts, preservation of culture, cultural advancement, and education. During the Dark Ages, Christian monks kept libraries of books, and they also rewrote manuscripts, creatiing more copies of them. That saved a LOT of the ancient classics from being destroyed and forgotten, because at that time, nobody cared about books or education. Literally all universities were originally for the purposes of theology, and that's how schools like Cambridge and Oxford started out. Harvard and Yale in America were largely for divinity when they started out too. A lot of architecture and literature and art was either patronized by religious sources or were outright created for religious sources, whether you are looking at the Sistine Chapel, or great composers such as J.S. Bach. While Aristotle stunted scientific growth due to conformity to his beliefs, he is to this day regarded as a great figure in history. There are a ton of religious philosophers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas. Religious architecture is a pillar of human civilization, whether you take the Mayan or Egyptian pyramids, or Middle Eastern mosques, or Christian cathedrals. Literacy in many places was in the ken of religious scholars. Religions such as Buddhism allowed Eastern monks to train to attain spiritual enlightenment and do things physically impossible to most humans, allowing them to live much more fulfilling lives (to them) than most other people. I could go on literally all day.
The most crucial thing about religion, which goes far beyond any of the stuff listed above, is its central role in the development of ethics and morality. Hammurabi's code and the Old Testament/Torah established rules against things against crimes such as murder and adultery in a world where those rules had not really been outlawed, (see greek mythology for a good taste of that.) While some people manage to be twisted and evil while going to church, the vast majority of people are better people precisely because they were brought up with religious beliefs. Even the atheists, who claim to have rejected religion, still follow the same basic rules that religion created in teh first place, becuase those religious rules are at this point SOCIETY's rules. And by the way, a lot of the great scientists, including Albert Einstein, believed in God. Maybe, just maybe, Albert Einstein is in a better position to evaluate the relationship between science and religion than you. Atheism is not the same as science, and science and religion are not mutually exclusive.
tl;dr you are blaming religion for stuff, while completely discounting its pivotal role in human civilization. A lot of atheists do that because that's the only way they can make religion seem useless. It's one, big, fat straw man. A lot of really really useful stuff happened because of religion, and it is ignorant, (maybe willfully ignorant) to claim otherwise. Blame the whackos -- the Klansmen, the Arab terrorists. Saying that those people are religion is like sayiing Shiiro Ishi or Josef Mengele are "science."