It is just as easy to point to the ideas of the extreme members of the “new atheist” movement as evidence that they are a dangerous cult.

Using the Southern Baptist Church as your example of religion is not a very good argument. Implying that atheists are somehow more rational as a group is not really a great argument either.

By the way, I am an atheist. I do no consider my beliefs to be unassailable scientific conclusions though. I recognize that many of my beliefs and preferences lack the robust rational foundation I would like them to. I doubt I am the pinnacle of morality or ethics ( more than doubt - but I am not looking to trash my own reputation here ).

Voting against your own interests or scapegoating others for what you see as damage against yourself or even just plain old hate do not require religion. Humans have lots of ways at arriving at those and being manipulated into them.

I agree with you. Using religion to manipulate people for political reasons is not really a religion problem. If you eradicate religion, there are many other levers to pull. In fact, manipulating religious groups these days after requires using these other weaknesses against people and then convincing them to ignore the conflict with their religious teachings.

Let’s say we agree.

Do you find this post more scientific or more religious?

Because I will agree with you if we can agree that the position being taken here is driven by treating science as a religion ( one they poorly understand ).

Spoken like a scientist. I doubt that is the answer they were looking for.

In my view, there are two components to “religion”.

1 - it typically starts with an attempt to explain why and how things are

2 - it becomes a human administration - this becomes more about politics than “religion”

Most of the problems with religion stem from the second part. I see the politics as the far bigger problem there. So people that want to create political movements around “science” are absolutely no better in my view.

If you read the question being asked in this thread critically, do you find it a scientific question? A political one?

I am not even remotely religious. But I take science pretty seriously.

Please tell me, scientifically, why you are so sure that people of faith are wrong?

There is some decent science that prayer does not work. I am not aware of anything offers anything at all testable concerning God.

And if we are simply pushing our preferences on others, I think a more important question is what makes people that claim to be evidence driven to adopt such strong opinions on things ( without evidence ) that they feel comfortable publicly slamming the preferences and values of others ( again with no evidence at all ).

As a science fan, you can say that absence of evidence means you do not have to believe. Correct. You cannot say that an absence of evidence proves your guess correct such that you can treat people who believe otherwise as stupid. Incorrect.

And “they have to show me the evidence” is a moronic stance. As a fan of the scientific method, evidence is YOUR burden of proof. For people that adhere to a religion, their standard is FAITH. So, they are holding up their end and you are dropping the ball. So what gives you the right to be the abuser?

So, I guess my answer to “why do people believe in religion would be”, “well, people still have faith and tradition and science has not produced any evidence that credibly calls that into question”.

Why are people not arriving at this conclusion on their own in 2024? Why have we failed so badly to explain the scientific method that people can still make wild pronouncements like this one.

I don’t like religion because it makes people easy to manipulate. People that treat science like a religion exhibit the same problems. I am not a fan of that.

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I assume your comment is about FreeBSD but Ubuntu 24.04 is Linux “software released a few weeks ago” and it did no better than CentOS Stream 9.

FreeBSD led on quite a few benchmarks. Quite interesting.

On Debian, i386 is now i686.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#i386-is-i686

They are really i686 though ( from Bookworm on ).

Antix 23.1 is based on Debian bookworm, so I think it requires i686 now. Older Antix releases ( based on Bullseye or earlier ) should work.

Have an upvote from me