Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 03, 2017

Mythology, religion – one and the same.

And that is only among one group of related religions.

A joke of them being the last three on Earth. They have this argument in the boat and the boat blows up from leaking gas when they all light matches. Got comes down with two sacks. He first releases a female monkey, then a male. As they scamper into the woods God says, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.”

Did religion enable any person to fly across continents and oceans?

Did religion get men to the moon?

Did religion enable you to communicate with someone on the other side of the planet at the speed of light?

Did religion explain how the sun shines?

Did religion tell us what the moon really looked like?

Did religion discover the laws of physics?

Did religion find insulin?

Did religion eliminate smallpox?

Was it religion that found how keep people from dying of sepsis after surgery?

Was it religion that explained what the heart and the brain really did?

Was it religion that emancipated humanity from the slavery of unwanted pregnancy?

Was it religion that led to the discoveries that enable us to live longer and better than those in the times of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed?

No.

God help us because religions are going to destroy us.

I think Wiley nailed it.

Wiley must really be trying to stir the pot

So, a priest, a rabbi, and minister walk onto a picket line………….

Sadly this is true nowadays for research too …

“My research beats your methodology”

Sounds like they all agree. What’s the problem? Heh-heh-heh…

Funny as Wiley’s religion seems to be that of the church of Global Warming, complete with it’s own undeniable, debate is over, consensus.

Religion will always beat mythology, every time.

Interestingly, I know a lot of clergy of many different religions, and I get along with them all just fine, and they unfailingly have respect for each other.

“Religions” are just cults with better P.R.Spin Doctors and a bigger budget.

I’ve always liked Kathleen Madigan’s idea that we all may be wrong and God if it exists turns out to be the guy wearing the ball cap that reads “Who Farted”.

God is an energy field that can be used for good or bad. You don’t need religion to have a relationship with god. Don’t forget the miracle of your own existence and the mystery of consciousness.

IMO, God is “Wow!” with different names.

Said the atheist cartoonist. If you believe in diversity, then you have to accept religious people too. No cherry picking.

Thank God I’m atheist.

The really hilarious part is technically, all three worship the same god.

“My Zeus beats your Odin!”

… let’s call the whole thing off!

If Moses, Jesus and Mohammed came back to earth today, there would be a double shock: they would not recognized their religions and more the shame, their religions would not recognize them.

Look at “Pearls Before Swine” today for a slightly different take on “religion”.

They’re ALL right.

….at least the signs don’t say: “My religion trumps your mythology”….! That would have really opened the hatch…

Of course, since they’re mutually contradictory, they can’t all be right.

But they can all be wrong!

Was Jesus a heretical rabbi, the messiah, or the last great prophet before Mohamed? Good question for religious students, bad excuse for a fight.

What do you get when you cross an agnostic, an insomniac, and a dyslexic? Someone who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.

I prefer my mythology over your religions, any day !

Their my myths…. and I’ll tell them, anyway I want to !

ALL “Religions” are just attempts at “Mythdirections” anyway…and ALL are Man-Made nonsense.

@Apikoros: I don’t think so. His aim was notoriously bad! ;^)

Religious people can be jerks, no matter if they are Christian, Muslim, Buhdist, Hindu, Athiest, or Jewish.

Heck, I’d just say that the occasional jerk is a trait of humanity, and that person’s religion is just a way of justifying their intolerance.

I am up to 25 major scientific discoveries by clergy, never mind other believers. There is a space limit preventing listing, despite the chance of enlarging the list by those I haven’t found. Still, the “evangelical atheists” would deny the list, just as surely as they deny religion, for no other reason than that they said so. Projecting as bad as Trump.

Notice they are all males too. They must be taking a break from oppressing women.

@Hippogriff: Cited for failure to read.

First: Many scientists profess to being of a religious faith. In the past, up until the late 1800s, and perhaps later, most scientists would have accepted the existence of a deity. I do not fault them for that. At the time, a deity was not an unreasonable explanation for the world they knew. A deity as the originator of that world made more sense than mere randomness. But the universe and its laws, as known then, seemed fully deterministic.

As I pointed out in another comment, this all has changed over the last century. We can now plausibly argue that this universe we inhabit is one instance in plethora of universes. We can also argue that it could arise from a random fluctuation. (See the book, A Universe from Nothing )

So that you might find people with religious beliefs making contributions to science and technology is neither surprising nor useful. I never said that they did not contribute, so your argument is the real straw man.

But the point you have utterly failed to understand is that no deity was required for them to make those discoveries. Or to make those experiments.

The Wright Brothers’ father was a bishop. But I wonder how many times they had to hear (from other people, not their father), “If God wanted Man to fly, He would have given us wings!” And so on… Can you find one injunction anywhere in any religious text that says that we should fly and travel to other worlds? Or even that we should build instruments to look at and for other worlds.