It's also the greatest tool that has ever been created for destroying superstition and myth. We're in the golden age of critical thinking, something that is very destructive to religious belief.
Source/citation/justification? Seems just as easy to make the opposing argument, that mass media technologies are being perfected to the point where it'll soon be possible to use highly optimized Skinner boxes for disseminating propaganda, something like Zynga plus Fox News. The victims would be voluntarily opting in to their own brainwashing.
Case in point.
> We're in the golden age of critical thinking
What if we were to establish schools the same way they existed in the 1800s with the same rigor? Small, mixed classes, all in a single room, hopefully taught by the very well-educated.
I think history's greatest logical thinkers would beg to differ with you. The history books are always trying to be rewritten by someone BUT religious thought has driven this critical thinking and logic for millennial. Also explain why more people are Christians now then ever? Percentage and Numbers???
Good information has always taken work to obtain. The Internet cannot compensate for intellectual laziness, it can only magnify the effectiveness of the efforts of those willing to exercise discernment and look at things with a critical eye.
I live in the U.S. where the country was built by those that wanted freedom of religion.
That's a bit of a stretch. In Puritan New England, worshipping anything other than the Christian God was a capital offence.
Notice the word "especially". Scientology is based on the idea of what some might call aliens having superhuman powers. In atheism, a number of superhuman powers, i.e. things that humans cannot do, are ascribed to science- even though there is nothing that disallows that God could be involved in everything from the big bang to evolution, somehow the Big Bang and Evolution take on a life of their own, without full understanding of them.
Darwin takes the place of a prophet, although Darwin himself was not an atheist [1] and said, "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence."
Faith and science can co-exist, but atheism has a belief that they can't. They put up billboards, organize, take donations, have musical rallies at military bases with atheist songs, and pass out literature like evangelical religions. And they are as intolerant and unaccepting as well. I find them quite obnoxious, but atheism is a religion, therefore according to our freedom of religion, it must be allowed, but it should be allowed along with the free practice of any other religion in any place, at any time, in any public place.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Charles_Darw...
Of course they can co-exist, and atheism has nothing to say against religion: religion, by definition, is non-falsifiable, so atheism can not negate it.
Atheism is, nevertheless, very sceptical about the actual existence of a supreme being. It can't prove its non-existence, but still considers it as veeeery improbable. As "there are a million reasons which explain why we believe in god which are much more probable than the fact that god exists".
So yes, you can accept science and religion, but accepting the later can not be based on reason (because there is no logical method to disprove the existence of god)
As explained in the link, there are two kind of atheists: gnostic-atheists (strong-atheists) and agnostic-atheists (weak-atheists)
In my opinion, since proving the existence/non-existence of gods (and spaghetti monsters, and pink unicorns) is impossible, gnostic-atheism is untenable (in the same sense that gnostic-theism is untenable).
But, and I think this what matters for an atheist to identify as such, the fact that the non-existence of god can not be proved does not make it an important subject. It is just one of those things that can not be proved or disproved (by construction), and has no more relevance that the orbiting of a tea pot around the sun.
EDIT: actually, I stand corrected by this very interesting article and I will stick to the Sagan Plausability Scale for these discussions: http://www.skepticink.com/incredulous/2013/08/20/why-the-fam...
I guess that what I am trying to say is that a "strong atheist" (with judgements based on reason), can not really assert with 100% confidence that god does not exist. He can, nevertheless, be convinced that the likelihood of its existence is for all practical purposes 0.
It is not that he "believes that god does not exist", it is more that he thinks along the lines of "why should I care about this particular teapot?"
Reason doesn't rely on falsifiability (science does, but science is a subset of reason, not the same thing as reason.)
Wait, what?
As an atheist, I never realized I believe in and worship Darwin as a superhuman controlling power. Thanks for pointing this out to me! I'll make sure to put a Darwinian altar in my house and pray to it daily, for giving me food to eat and keeping my family members healthy!
Also, talking about the actions of a small number of atheists, as if you're talking about all atheists, is just as ignorant as calling out all Christians for the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Well done, for confirming the prejudice of narrow mindedness that both your fellow countrymen and fellow Christians already have to deal with.
No it's not. Your entire argument is based on a false premise.