Gawd! You expect that a certain percentage of people are going to be highly delusional, but that they have $27 million available for this museum!?? Only in America.

I tend to be in agreement with a rising tide of thought among atheists, and expressed in a couple of recent books ("God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Christopher Hitchens, and "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins), that takes issue with those who try to arrange a truce between science and religion. Those who take that latter position, often scientists, try to suggest that the two are not really in conflict, and that each has its proper place in society. The two authors mentioned, and I, believe otherwise. Religion is, almost by definition, false, relying, as it does, on faith. These differences are not just philosophical; real harm results from irrational belief systems. As just one recent example we have the well-supported figure of around one MILLION(!)dead Iraquis (*)as a result of an unprovoked war against a sovereign country supported on religious grounds by fundamentalist Christians.

It is laughable how this belief system has had to continually retreat from the advances of science, desperately advancing short-term stupidities in order to accomodate the overwhelming evidence science presents. The article Chris cites alludes to that in mentioning how fossil bones were first explained away as a test of man's faith in God. In another of the Earthquake Prediction sites, a Jesus-freak poster is approvingly citing an article by a scientist(?) wherein the scientist attempts to accomodate the Big Bang theory by asserting that the theory demonstrates a guiding intelligence.

Thanks, Chris. Good read.

MW
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