Just to name one over generalization in your post…. There are lots of intelligent people, including scientists, who don't believe in anthropogenic global warming. John Stossel (just look up his segment on scientists who don't believe in global warming in youtube) and David Icke come to mind. There are politics in science as well as religion, 'ya know.

You sure make a lot of assumptions about my religion. For instance, that I believe in some 2000-year-old dead wiseguy. That I'm anti-science. That I believe a bunch of dogmatic crap. Who are you talking to, really? It isn't me, and you didn't even take the time to look up Unitarian Universalism before you indulged in your tirade of ignorant assumptions. Or do you think it's my Zen Buddhist side that believes in the miracle power of some old teacher?

I do know there's something "greater than myself." It's called the Milky Way. And that just one local example.

Your deeply fundamentalist belief in Science doesn't help me answer FOR MYSELF the meaning of my life. My answers don't help YOU either. But it doesn't mean anybody needs to go suck on eggs.

The fact that you can't find ways to make human interactions or organize outside of a religious framework, just means you haven't been looking hard enough.

I've looked into all kinds of religions as an adult. Guess what, every one of them is dead right, and everyone who doesn't follow them is dead wrong. I don't believe in Zues or Apollo, do you? Of course not, along with all the other thousands of gods you ignore- and I just have one less god than you do.

The idea that religions answer the big questions in life is ridiculous in the extreme. Science answers questions, admits when it gets those answers wrong and adjusts accordingly. Religion is dogma, that cannot grow. It is shit that is made up by people just like you with no evidence what-so-ever. If it had evidence your religion would be accepted by science, (and it would change everything we know about the world we live in) as it is religion is just left chasing the tail of science as it makes real effort to explain away religious superstition and make the gaps where your god is hiding smaller and smaller. At least L Ron Hubard had the guts to make up his own religion. I respect that more than just followng other poeple's bullshit. Thinking is hard. And don't tell me your truth is more truthy because it was written 2000 years ago in your special word of god book, or that it's an ancient chinese secret, becasue neither of those consituet evidence based thinking.

You don't need to lobotomize yourself to join a religion, just stop thinking and replace it with faith. Materialism is a fact of life since this life is all we have and the bodies we live in until we die. Those are material things. And if you are going to talk about life after death in any form, please provide proof and show your work. Don't quote other people's made up nonsense.

I don't expect any of this would change your mind since religion and spiritiual thinking innoculates you from ever having to examine the evidence or admit that you have been duped. Which is what irritates me about religion, by the way. Along with the idea that you are not allowed to critisize it or examine it's failings. If you have an odd historical theory, it can be discussed and debated. If you have a new scientific theory, it can be studied or corroborated by independent testing. If you've made up a new sky god and a list of rules that he demands that humanity follow for their finite earthy existence or accept eternal consequences, well everyone will just have to keep quite about that and humor the shit out of you or their just being general and defensive about your baseless, factless, evidence poor, deeply felt conjecture. How rude of us all to question….

I belong to one religious community (a Unitarian Universalist congregation), and also a spiritual community of Zen Buddhist practitioners. I have not found other communities in secular society that address the big questions about the meaning of life, how to conduct oneself ethically, and how to help the world through effective group action.

You don't have to lobotomize yourself to join a religious community, and joining with others helps combat the narcissism and materialism that seem to constitute the de facto "religious" values of our consumerist society.

Presbyterians started out otherworldly at the time of Franklin, and became the religion of the rich by the time of Lincoln; Methodists were the sect of the poor and the tradesman under Wesley, and became a denomination of the educated and successful by the time of Norman Vincent Peale. My forbears were Anabaptists who fled Calvin's Geneva for their lives… but today Baptists are stereotypical of intolerance. (This hardening toward the poor is more true of Christians than Jews in my experience).

Which I suppose is why Alexander Pope wrote,

Go, like the Indian, in another life
expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife;
As well as dream such trifles are assign'd,
As toys and empires, for a god-like mind.

Rewards, that either would to virtue bring
No joy, or be destructive of the thing;
How oft by these at sixty are undone
The virtues of a saint at twenty-one!

To whom can riches give repute or trust,
Content or pleasure, but the good and just?
Judges and senates have been bought for gold;
Esteem and love were never to be sold.

Who noble ends by noble means obtains,
Or failing, smiles in exile or in chains,
Like good Aurelius let him reign, or bleed
Like Socrates, that man is great indeed….

What's fame? a fancied life in others' breath,
A thing beyond us, e'en before our death…
All that we feel of it begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes or friends.

(From the Essay on Man)