Yes you make a good point, and you illustrate the other side of the spectrum of religion being taken out of context of trying to explain the physical world. Just as bad as the other side.
What side?
Are they taking their religion out-of-context, or do you have an illusion of harmony? Religious scripture makes specific fact claims about the natural world, which is impossible to fit into your proposed dichotomy. For instance, every Christian who lived before the 17th century has thought, that the Earth is < 10000 years old and affirmed special creation.
43% of the US population does not accept evolution.
Is this out of context? Do these millions of millions of millions of people have an incorrect view of their religion? Do the famous Christian theologians of the past, from Aquinas and Augustine etc. have the wrong view of Christianity? Or is it you that is incapable of understanding that religions actually do make serious fact claims about the world.
The science of human behavior is probably one of the worst things to happen to myth. If you could only see all the junk Shakespeare analysis that has been churned out because people start applying psychoanalysis to his works.
By the science of human behavior, I do not mean psychoanalysis, I mean cognitive science, neurobiology etc.
Not only that but Darwin's theories has led some to believe that they could justify their actions because of 'survival of the fittest'. Social Darwinism I believe. It's subtle but you will notice how morality and meaning gets lost when science rears its head in. We aren't human beings anymore, were just a mass of cells right?
I'm not sure what type of myth I shall refute first!
Darwin's ideas of evolution did not lead to anything. Darwin did not even use the term "survival of the fittest" and today, it is simply a conversational term to explain evolution to laymen. In modern evolutionary biology, the correct term would be "survival of the most cooperative" or "survival of those who fit best". "Fit" does not means "strong" in this context by the way. Furthermore, in modern biology, Darwin is a nobody. Both racism and Nazism existed before Darwin, so playing the blame game will get you nowhere.
Not only that, they committed the naturalist fallacy. You cannot get an 'ought' from an 'is'. As the coup de grâce, I'll even show how it is scientifically inaccurate. Let us say that we think that selecting for a strong immune system is going to help humanity and that we should sterilize or kill the rest. This will not help the survival of humans, since bacteria and viruses simply will mutate along. Furthermore, disease such as bird flu actually only kills the strong individuals, since it triggers a cytokine storm, a positive-feedback loop that makes the body self-destruct.
Actually, morality is completely natural and all ethical statements and moral imperatives can be reduced to empirical statements concerning the natural world.
"you ought to do X" is equivalent to "you ought to do X, since X => Y and Y is a normative proposition, that is, everyone will do it provided they have access to all informations and their reasoning is not fallacious. They only time one does not do X is when one either lacks information or has a poor reasoning.
X => Y (empirical statement that can be confirmed or refuted by science)
Y is a normative proposition (empirical statement that can be confirmed or refuted by cognitive science).
Furthermore, all moral propositions that rests on faulty empirical assumptions is necessarily wrong, since you cannot justify a conclusion with incorrect premises or logical fallacies. This is how we explain moral progress. One can either question a persons understanding of facts, or his reasoning. Then it follows that we know that the Nazi is wrong because his justification is that the Jew is not human and that he therefore has no value. But Jews are humans and it does not follow that non-humans lack value. So we can objectively, from science, say that Nazis where morally wrong.
You seem to have an irrational fear of reductionism. It doesn't matter if you are made of cells or paper, what matters is emotion, sentience and consciousness. To say that humans are just cells is stating the obvious. This fact changes nothing in our treatment of others or morality. However, religion does corrupt morality, since he have the true believers and the heretics, who deserve to die and be punished forever and ever.
Say you are listening to Bach. You like Bach. Then you realize that what you are hearing is just sound waves hitting your ear drum from an oscillator that has recorded hammers hitting wires made by a person's nervous system rearranging itself due to blobs on a piece of paper. Then you listen to Bach again. You still like Bach just as much as you did before, despite the fact. You might even like it more.
How about the Crusades? The Inquisition? Witch burning? Pope's condemnation of condoms in Africa resulting in the death of millions? Forced conversion of Nordic pagans? Where is the morality then? Where is the morality when apostasy is punished with death in Islam, for instance?
QED.
As a result, humans came to act like wild animals everywhere you go. I would even go as far and say that humans are apes on steroids.
Our capabilities for reason far outweighs those of apes or "wild animals". Humans are animals because they are classified as "Animalia". There isn't really anything more to it than that.
Also, Derren Brown fakes it quite often:
http://www.simonsingh.net/Derren_Brown_Article.html
I think you've pretty much beaten me anyway! Touche!
