Thanks for responding. I always enjoy expanding on my ideas of whatever kind whenever I can. (As for “whatever kind,” here’s a new essay I wrote about the world’s current and ongoing calamity. I should edit that: The calamity rests almost exclusively in the United States of America. Feel free to leave a comment there as well.)
To your response, science “interprets” reality by telling us (when it can) what’s true and what isn’t by separating fact from fiction. Religion does no such thing. Its purview is storytelling (there’s nothing wrong with storytelling per se). If you have an example of where religion has stated or uncovered or unearthed something true and real about the world, I’d like to see what it is. Thanks.
My whole line of questioning is distinctly not meaningless because millions of people believe in the supernatural nonsense offered by religion, and then these insane beliefs insinuate themselves into world cultures as if they are to be respected as serious, important things. Worse, they are taught to children, who are encouraged to believe in Adam & Eve, Noah’s ark, and so on. The story of the Garden of Eden, for example, is just that: a story that has nothing to do with reality. Now, it’s possible that you understand that “Adam & Eve” are fictional characters in exactly the same way that “Batman & Robin” are fictional characters, and that’s fine. But what does society gain by encouraging people to believe that supernatural non-sense isn’t non-sense? (Deliberate hyphens there for emphasis.) Just for fun, I’ll use water to illustrate my point: a) there was no worldwide flood (historical records by thriving cultures show this to be true); re Moses, nobody commanded a body of water to part (because a command can’t influence or move a body of water); and no human can walk on water (science, with its reality-based understanding of weight-displacement ratios, explains why).
Again, as literary tropes that express a moral in the same way that story of Little Red Riding Hood expresses a moral, that’s fine. Same goes for all the imaginative stories in the Bible and other “holy” books (no horse ever “miraculously” sprouted wings and flew to a magical place called “Heaven”). Mind you, I think imaginative thinking is great and wonderful, but I get my fill of imaginative thinking by reading novels, not by paying attention to loony religious texts.
Finally, as for this notion that religions have important things to say about reality and existence, and that maybe religion has answered something or figured out something about existence that science has not, I’m reminded of this excellent challenge by Sam Harris:
