Religulous - Bill Maher

[3-LockBox]

Even science has its limitations. While every religion has an origin story or a Genesis if you will, science's origin story is no less a leap of faith, based on study and what few facts we have, but faith nonetheless. Genesis suggests a higher being spoke and "it was so" regarding creation, science gives us the Big Bang Theory, which also suggests 'something from nothing'. Evolution works on many levels explaining the origins of things, until you explain just how perfectly simple cells that could reproduce independantly of anything decided to 'become' male and female, for some reason, and still evolve at the same rate so as to propigate the wide variety of sepcies we have now, perfectly. Science wants us to believe in both 'random' and 'selection' with regards to life. It could make sense, but it is at times, convenient.

[Feanor]

Even science has its limitations. While every religion has an origin story or a Genesis if you will, science's origin story is no less a leap of faith, based on study and what few facts we have, but faith nonetheless. Genesis suggests a higher being spoke and "it was so" regarding creation, science gives us the Big Bang Theory, which also suggests 'something from nothing'. ...

No. Science -- as practiced by good scientists -- is the antithesis of faith. You develop a thesis based on observed, documented, and measured phenomenon. Then you try to destroy that theory through objective and controlled experimentations. This is most unlike religious faith in general.

(In the past much more than today apparently, it was common of various theological schools to debate -- in an armchair sort of way -- various theological hypotheses, usually constrained by very rigid "givens" about the character of God, etc. Even this narrow, scholastic questioning is clearly abandoned by e.g. by Fundamentalists who seem to prefer the pronouncements of self-proclaimed authorities.)

...
Evolution works on many levels explaining the origins of things, until you explain just how perfectly simple cells that could reproduce independantly of anything decided to 'become' male and female, for some reason, and still evolve at the same rate so as to propigate the wide variety of sepcies we have now, perfectly. Science wants us to believe in both 'random' and 'selection' with regards to life. It could make sense, but it is at times, convenient.

Evolution requires random change, disproportionate survival of some of those changes, and propogation of the surviving changes through some mechanism, not necessarily biological.

Again, good science doesn't want us to believe anything. It proposes hypotheses or theories and wants us to pick holes in them. The strong theories survive and the weak perish: thus theories evolve and propogate.

[emaidel]

I too am a man of faith like GroundBeef, and not by any means a prostelatizer. I was raised a Roman Catholic, but left the church in my late teens, and remained at first agnostic, then full-fledged atheistic until a little over 3 years ago when I joined the Lutheran Church. I chose the Lutheran faith because I admired Luther's intentions which were not to create a church of his own, but to reform a truly corrupt Catholic Church at the time. To me, the Lutheran faith is very much "Catholic Lite."

I still don't accept many church teachings, and flatly refuse to believe in creationism, as some in my faith would have me do. I also detest and despise Bill Maher and every hair on his body, and thus have no interest whatsoever in seeing "Religulous." May I suggest a more literate film condemning many anti-semitic actions of the Catholic Church, and the invasion of ultra right-wing evangelical "mega-churches' into our military, and that is "Constantine's Sword."