We also saw this with the recent disasters of Katrina (Ivan, Dennis, Francis) which punished those all those fornicators in New Orleans. The Mega-Tsunami which killed 300,000 thousand sinners in SouthEast Asia, and don’t forget those sinners on Wall Street who received a negative judgement from God on 9/11. And those who barely survived by “miracle alone” are now seen as saints. Somebody please give me a deer pistol, this is too much for me!

I still think that there is a nice ring to this statement. Further, I think that it is still a useful argument against racism. Thanks for raining knowledge on my parade though, always welcome, even if it means I may need to change the tune a bit.

Although which genes were present didn’t differ dramatically between the Asians and the Europeans, their expression did. And that expression was governed by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—one-letter changes in DNA­—in nearby regulator regions that determine how much of a gene’s product is made. Overall, 25 percent of the genes seem to show different levels of expression in Asians versus Europeans, and SNPs in regulatory regions probably account for much of the difference. In the case of one gene, researchers found that Caucasians expressed it at 22 times the strength that Asians did.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/is-there-a-genetic-basis-to-race-after-all

Even so, if Tim worshipped science (while disdaining Dawkins et al.), maybe he would see my point of view better. Likewise, I am constantly getting better at putting myself in the shoes of others.

What’s at issue is how do humans formulate morality, whether from some belief in ourselves alone as generators of morality or of some other source which gives us guidance, which some call God or some fusion of the two.”

I agree with just about every piece of these two paragraphs. Your conclusions, however….

The thing you left out is this: making decisions of any kind depends on the information you have. Science does not provide moral answers, but it can give us the basis for a higher moral application. The whole notion of separate human races, which in previous centuries has allowed for a kind of self-justifying isolation of conscience, is dispelled by science. The bigot may say “I choose to hate that person because his skin is a different color and his eyes are differently shaped, therefore he is not of my race” but biologist calls him a liar. The creationist may say “I believe the world was created in 4004 B.C. by the god of the bible” but science says he is in profound error. Extreme religionists may claim “AIDS is a judgment of god and the people who contract it are sinners” but science shows that it is just a disease, like any other, and all diseases are just nature trying to get along at our expense.

Science takes the guess-work out of establishing criteria for judgment.

Science may not be more “predictable” for making moral decisions, but it’s a damn sight more reliable when determining what is or is not a false basis of decisions.

Science has my respect, Burke does not. In older times his conduct of picking and choosing which Church doctrines to promote and which to diminish was not held in high regard by the Church. I see the man as a modern day Savoronola.

Take for instance harm done in the name of religion. As we’ve discussed here at Dangerous Intersection before, most people who claim to “hate fags” for religious reasons probably just find homosexuals disgusting, and have dug out a convenient biblical example for their feelings of disgust. In the past, the Bible justified slavery, but white plantation owners probably didn’t own slaves because the Bible told them to. The did it for personal reasons, and the Bible just helped to justify it.

Or take one of our favorite big religious crimes: the Crusades. Again, you could even chalk the Crusades up to pure racial intolerance and ethnocentrism, only justified and explained through religious reasoning, not caused by it.

But without religion, people would have only had real-world justifications for their actions, which unlike religious claims, must meet rational arguments and make sense. Most people don’t attack religious arguments the way they attack factual or logical statements. Religion gets some kind of special pedestal, above all requirements of reasoned discourse. If you take away that free-pass to illogic, keeping slaves, discriminating against gays, and forcibly converting people suddenly doesn’t have such a strong case. So many of these terrible things done in the name of religion wouldn’t have happened, or persisted as long as they did.

Yet without religious justifications, the good things that people do in the name of religion would still occur! Why such a disparity between good and bad things? Well, benevolent action has plenty of logical and emotional pulls in its favor even without religion. Most of us like to feel like good people, and enjoy seeing other people happy (if even for our own benefit, evolutionary-psychology wise). We don’t need religion to motivate or explain good deeds to us. So if you take away religion, you weaken the defenses for malevolent behavior, yet somehow the good in people persists. So religion does not get the credit.

Just because a person says religion makes them do something doesn’t mean that it actually does.