a lot of science vs. religion stuff today

It is weird how some days, you'll hear a lot of related things or have a common theme common up in conversations or communications. Today, for me, that was a lot of science vs. religion stuff. Someone at work e-mailed around to everyone at work the following Newsweek story, about the "Beyond Belief" conference at the Salk Institute in LaJolla, Calif. I thought it was pretty inappropriate for that to be e-mailed around, but be that as it may. I also heard on Dennis Prager's radio show a discussion based on that sage philosopher Elton John's comments that he thought that religion should be banned. Then on the O'Reilly Factor, Bill was interviewing the head of the American Atheists organization.

I'm not the most religious person, but I think that religion can play a very positive role in people's lives and believe that people should be free to worship as they wish (so long as its not radical Islam!). People like Richard Dawkins are very aggressively anti-religion. For people, such as myself, who are adherents of the scientific method and want a wider dissemination of science education amongst the public, I think it is extremely counter-productive to be so aggressively against religion because that will only turn people off.

I also see that in the world today Western Civilization is at war with radical Islam and the only way we are going to win that conflict is if we are more committed to out ideals than they are to theirs. I think that without the strength of our Judeo-Christian ideals we don't stand a chance against the Islamo-fascists. For people like Dawkins to be fighting against Judeo-Christianity is, to me, to be seeking to slit our own wrists.