NOT Obama, but bring your popcorn.

[Skybird]

Creationism did exist at the time of the cold war, yes. What's the surprise? Today, it is rising even more in Polland, Russia, and especially - in the Islamic world. There it has been dressed in slightly different symbols to make it compatible with Islamic commandements and rules, but in principal it is the very same like amongst Christian fundamentlaists. It was copied from them, to be precisely. Some Turkish writer has made a fortune by writing according books and publish them in the Muslim world, but the phenomenon goes far beyond him.

Richard Dawkins makes a distinction between atheism and antitheism, which in ordinary language usually is ignored. The one means the conviction that gods do not exist, the other means to simply not be interested and not caring for whether gods exist or not.

If you are looking at religions precisely, you cannot say that Buddhism is just one religion amongst others - D.T. Suzuki for example would point out that indeed Buddhism and the attitude it teaches, should be seen as the inevitable basis of all true religion (and I agree). For just one simple reason: if you strip it of all folkloristic ballast and institutional distractions and rites and habits (Buddhism was not immune to get distorted by these things like for example Jesus' teachings as well), then what you are left with, is simply this "teaching": "see things yourself, decide yourself, do not believe becausue something is said, is hear-say, is written down on old pergaments, is said by older men. Examine things yourself, your mind, and how it works, the way you perceive the world and experience your life. What is it that is looking through your eyes, and thinks of what it sees as "me" ? " Buddhism, in it's essential form, is the most radical empirism you can get to. In principal, belief and traditonal teachings and books have no room in it. But I admit that many Buddhist schools and traditions and representatives seem to have forgotten that, allowing it to get covered and hidden by rites and rituals like in any other religion, and superstition and earthly interests of influential priest's hierarchies and church-like institutions. But this is not what Buddha has taught. It'S also not what Jesus has taught.

In principal, atheism's sceptical attitude and Buddhism's empirical attitude and the methodology of science all three go very well together. None of these three compares to religious traditions like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or to political-religious systems like Islam, or economic-criminal systems like scientology, or purely political systems like facism or forms of democracy.

On the "competition" between science and religions, just this. Responsibly run science will never claim to know the last, the final, the ultimate answers. Science does not produce eternally lasting truths - only temporary theories. It does not explain the WHY of the universe, it focusses on examining and explaining the HOW, and it does so by principles that basically have not changed much since the ancient Greek have brought them up. Religion does not examine neither the WHY nor the HOW - it nevertheless just claims to have the uiltimate and final answer to the question of WHY, in modern days leaving the answer of the HOW to science (sometimes more sometimes less willingly). That's why from a standpoint of mental economy, for people like me believing in religions does not give us anything we think we need. It does nothing for us and does not help us a bit. If we stay within the realm of science, we will not know the WHY, and if we stay within the religions' realms, we still do not know the WHY - we just do not admit it and hide our lacking knowledge behind some arbitrary random fantasy that has not been checked, cannot be checked and never will be checked. But this unavailability of it for analytical examination does not make blind belief a virtue, nor does it turn it into more than what it is: just an arbitrary claim thought out by human minds, designed to take away a bit the horror humans feel in the face of their mortality and the big dark abyss at the end of our life. And what makes us think of it as darkness and an abyss that we fear, is not so much our knowledge about what manifestates that status as "darkness" and "abyss", but right our lack of knowledge about what it is.

Which brings us back, in a way, to the question of WHY.