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Yesterday’s post was about the scientifically testable aspects of religion and its conclusion was that Religion is about binding a reproductive community together. The function of that binding together is to assure the survival of a group of people considered as family, by expanding the qualities of family relationship to a larger group of people than one’s known genetic relatives. Religion permits the defending of one’s personal genetic heritage with deadly force because it appeals to untestable qualities outside of the natural world. Those are supernatural things because we cannot validate them by natural methods, and therefore the justifications are based on their dictates that do not require logical explanation. A statement such as, “I am going to kill members of your group because food is in short supply for all of us and I don’t want you encroaching on my supply,” wouldn’t seem reasonable or fair even to our own people. However, couching the same actions as the commands of some supernatural being, which we all accept as authoritative, makes the actions understandable, even good. Instead religion will make seemingly reasonable statements like, “God told us to kill your people because he is unhappy with your encroaching on land which He gave to us.” In that way the religious person can shift the responsibility for horrific actions away from himself.

Religion and science can never be blended together because they are based on different needs and beliefs. Science is based on natural reality and the formulating of testable proofs of human created statements about what that reality is and what behaviors it will manifest under various defined conditions. Religion has the survival of the human group as its ultimate goal and because that is accepted as the ultimate value the followers of any particular religion can say or do anything whatsoever to achieve that goal. That goal is so paramount that it doesn’t need any testable reality, other than group survival, for its continuance. Religion  requires the acceptance of something of unchallengeable nature for its foundation, and therefore it turns to the supernatural, something beyond nature and its laws and therefore not testable. That is absurd for scientists, who welcome challenge, but it permits the religion’s people to create group myths which can be quite absurd but they play to the details of the group’s needs, hopes and aspirations. The goal of religious prophets becomes to create beautiful stories to validate whatever behaviors are needed by the group for its survival. Religion uses any means it needs to create group unity and enhance its own people’s survival.

For religion beauty becomes truth, for science truth becomes beauty.