Excellent piece
The internet has produced the instant expert, many people believing they can ague with experts armed only with a goggle search engine. You see it in the evolution and climate debates right now.

In the end it boils down to science is about facts and religion is about fantasy. Religious can't understand people with no faith and try to paint them as "believing stuff". While reality base people make the mistake of thinking that faith based people are capable of logical thought.

It must be greatly comforting to believe that you have no free will, and are just an automaton walking around according to coded programs in your dna. That you (but there is no "you" really is there?) have no responsibility for your actions, that your choice to study science and pursue knowledge and truth, in order to debunk religion, is simply the script that you are running on or some random pattern that arose by accident, and really you have no control over your destiny at all. Just a biological machine, a clockwork orange. I bet it makes sleeping at night really easy. I wish I was intelligent enough to be able to see and understand this truth that only genius scientists in their labs can comprehend, because then maybe i wouldn't feel so bad for that time i yelled at my parents, really my DNA made me do it...

Well done a clear example Donnie about what the Author is talking about, you read it but you didn't comprehend it.

Hi Kenny, well please enlighten me.

I am not a member of any religion and would claim to have a logical mind. I was raised [loosely] as Christian, but by the time I was 15 I was questioning and had rejected some of the basic tenets of Christianity. A search of my posts [not too many at this stage] would reveal that I am very critical of religious meddling in political, medical, sexual and so-called moral issues.

But, in the absence of any definite proof, one way or the other, I would say that having a religious belief is an act of faith and refusing to accept the possibility of what we could loosely term religious belief is also an act of faith.

Since I was a young child, I have had a wide variety of what could be called psychic experiences. During some of these experiences, I have learned about things of which I had no prior knowledge. This knowledge includes [but is not limited to] details of places I have never been to or heard about, how places I am familiar with looked many years before my birth and specific details of my ancestry. I have been able to verify the accuracy of this knowledge by investigation. I suppose we could call this the scientific approach. Those who are determined to deny the possibility of this kind of thing happening could say that I already knew about these things, but had forgotten that I knew. Please yourself, I'm not trying to convert anyone.

I lost my second wife coming up to four years ago. She had gone through a long distressing illness. Just after she died, her daughter [who so far as I know has no particular religious belief] told me that she wanted to be alone for a few minutes and "talk to mum". Within a few minutes, Sue told me she had a message for me. The "message" was a two-way private joke between Kathy and me. Sue said Kathy's opening bit, I responded like I always did and Sue finished the brief interchange with Kathy's words.

I have no wish to intrude in, and am not concerned by, the religious beliefs of others, with a few exceptions.
They are:
Number 1: I would like the courtesy recriprocated.
2: In this pluralist society, it is a divisive act for people to arrogate to their own religious beliefs the sole repository of morality. To cast the epithet that civilised society would collapse in the absence of their being there to provide the moral pillars of support. Those people are the ones who confuse and conflate the two completely separate issues of religious belief and morality.
3: It is deplorable, the religious immorality of on-going active campaigns to impose excessive and unwanted child bearing upon women in this world of 6.4 billion people, billions of whom are already desperate and unable to adequately foster their children.
4: But possibly the greatest concern of all is the attempt by a small minority of religious-minded to stifle the healthy curiosity of young people in their learning process: A minority with no knowledge of their place in the biological world, and no wish to learn. Gormless, unaware of humanity's niche in the web of life on this planet. Heedless of the similar emotions, the hopes, the fears, the communal obligations, the fundamental traits of good and bad that developed not only in ourselves, but also in our cousins the mammals from a common ancestry beyond a hundred million years ago. Oblivious to our shaky and all-too temporary perch on our ecological niche. Determined to negate the fostering, based on knowledge, of sensitivity in the culture of our society.
What hope humanity, should this narrow fundamentalist clique succeed in blinding society at this time of need for clear vision of its present parlous state. What hope, if it succeeds by carrying out the biblical edict of plucking out the eye that offends it so much?