History Visualized

If a religion holds the absolute truth and that is proven, then what will be your opinion of it?
Most of the "stories" you pronounce have been historically proven. The Big Bang theory prevails today in the interpretation of the origins of the universe and is in total agreement with the book of genesis. Does that make these "stories" useless to you too?
One can argue that the greatest war of all time (WW2) was based on ideology that disregards all aspects of religion and treats the human as a superhuman (Nietsche). Are you aware of that?
I can agree that a man's actions are more important than his religion, yet I still regard one specific religion as extremely valuable gift to mankind. About the rest of the religions, and probably creationism, I tend to agree with you.

Scientifically provable is an extremely narrow attribute in its definition for such an important aspect of a human's life. If the only value of my religion were it being scientifically provable (in terms of reproducibility), then it wouldn't be worth much. I can scientifically prove the Heisenberg uncertainty and Pauli's exclusion principle (in the lab or checking star properties many times), Einstein's field equations and several theorems by Gauß, Euler, Riemann and Lagrange, however not many people care about them. Everybody does care about religion. Without exception (you can verify this yourself). By the way, I wouldn't call Einstein or Gauß less intelligent than most (all?) people of the 21st century, just to keep some things in perspective.

About faith, it is always a matter of where you place your faith. I am aware, for instance, of the existence of quarks, however I cannot prove it at the moment and many people in the world will be completely unable to do so in their entire lifetime (proof as in show you the quark, like you want God to appear; what a weird idea). Physicists though, including me, believe what the standard literature on the subject says, without doing the experiment first. Otherwise, science wouldn't have progressed much since its inception. How can you tell that the existence of quarks is a fact? Because many physicists say so? For thousands of years, all wise men of science were claiming that the earth was flat. Nowadays, Newton's gravitation law proves incorrect (an approximation is an inconsistency, right?), the standard model is insufficient (read "incorrect"), so what was considered science once, is forgotten today (this also reminds me of the ether theory, supported by *physicists*; I still wonder how they could think of it, by the way!). The Big Bang theory (if you are aware of the scientific literature behind it) is the first acknowledgement of the existence of time's starting point by science, a notion that appears thousands of years ago in the book of genesis. The Newton universe is assumed infinite and eternally unchanged.

In my point of view, God created the world, set the rules that dictate its development and observes its function at least until its renovation, all for the sake of human. All life is created by Him, some people, however, have trouble separating the notions of the Creator and the rules He set (Darwin's "Evolution of the species" is the primary example; it's not all his fault, as the church of his time insisted that they knew better than the genesis writers and misguided him).

Throughout the history, religious differences were mostly considered an excuse to prepare people for the battle; always the main cause is financial difficulties, cultural/racial differences, the problem of survival or even plain greed (the crusades for instance). World War 2 simply shows that absence of religious causes (better, fight against religion, part the ideology of the 3rd Reich) can have the effect you claim is caused by religion. It doesn't make religions any better, it just makes them unrelated (to a large degree). By the way, the link you provided shows nothing related to religion; as a matter of fact, most of the wars it projects have absolutely no relation to religion (you should be aware that most ancient populations excluding the well-known empires (Egypt, Persia, Macedonia, Byzantium, Rome etc.) were in almost savage state and would attack and pillage anyone within their reach). It is illustrative of the above that during the crusades, Christians (so-called Christians, under the authority of the Pope) seized and pillaged Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire (within the limits of which Christianity originally flourished), with Christianity as the state religion!

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I am well aware that some aspects of religion (I can only discuss about mine, you'll have to look elsewhere for others) look nebulous and uncertain, maybe even contradicting, to the untrained observer. This is where training (as in science) is necessary. In my point of view, science (of the material world) and science (of the spiritual world) are orthogonal; knowledge (or ignorance) of the one doesn't translate into knowledge (or ignorance) of the other.

I regard that religion as the true one, because everything I could prove (empirical, personal proof, not necessarily reproducible by science standards, yet not the type that has absolutely no relation to reality) about it has been proven and has never let me down. Most disappointments I see in other people are related to their unfounded expectations and their looking up to persons that aren't actually worth it, as well as neglecting the essence of the faith and concentrating on its typical external qualities, something that is simply a waste of time.

Thank you for your time developing amarok and enhancing KDE; I gladly use them every day.