Viruses are specialized. They won't attack aliens. Bacteria might. It's the fungi in many respects that are the masters of this planet. If we manage to destroy ourselves so badly that we take out most multicellular organisms as well, it'll be the fungi that rebuild the ecology.
It'll probably be the fungi that the aliens have to worry about too.
Note: I'm not saying viruses don't have conditions they need met, they do, obviously. I'm saying they can attack an alien just as likely as they can a human.
And in fact they bump into some sort of algae that lives in the atmosphere that really likes the saline mixture that makes up most of the liquid in our bodies.
Any one taking care of a cat knows this well.
The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.
Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.
Give the dude a break on the athiest rant, he's been dead half a century.
Hang on. Are you implying that science created artifical life from just elements? Because that would be news to me.
Also post-industrial Europe and especially London had awful, awful air quality. I'll bet if you look at the 'seasons' for going to Bath, for instance, that they overlapped with the worst weather for creating smog in London.
If it's true that rhinovirus is such a potent inhibitor of SARS-CoV2, at the very least, the interplay between SARS-CoV2 and other respiratory viruses is non-trivial, and doesn't explain the complete suppression of influenza. Any simple hypothesis involving "competitive inhibition" is likely to be wrong.
The fact that rhinovirus continues to circulate so widely should also make people at least question the dominant narrative concerning masks and respiratory viruses. But I digress...
[1] https://syndromictrends.com/metric/panel/rp/percent_positivi...
Further experiments showed rhinovirus was triggering an immune response inside the infected cells, which blocked the ability of Sars-CoV-2 to make copies of itself.
What? What defenses do cells have after already being infected with viral RNA?
"We could see surges in flu. We could see surges in other respiratory viruses and other respiratory pathogens," she said,
Why? Why does covid mean we're going to see unusual winter surges in non-covid diseases?
This is actually a big problem for mRNA vaccines, which are also foreign RNAs, and to overcome it for example Pfizer/Moderna use unnatural RNA bases, among other things, to bypass these detection mechanisms.
It's not exactly clear how cells can distinguish self/non-self RNA, some markers are known, like different RNA cappings, different letter frequencies, some chemical modifications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria#Malariother...
It's well known that a primed immune system (in non-immunocompromised individuals) will combat viral infections more readily. The innate immune system (as opposed to the adaptive genetically diverse B/T-Cell antibody system) is a Thing and this is why people were discussing giving standard vaccines (including Flu, BCG, and others) before there were COVID specific vaccines. Saying that the "common cold" (which isn't a single virus, but a set of conditions), can "boot out" COV2 is silly gibberish and completely unsupported by evidence. Furthermore infecting people with unknown "colds" could in fact infecting them with (or covering up) "pre-symptomatic" COVID.
Sorry, but you need to bring the actual Bigfoot/Nessi in for people to believe outrageous claims at this point. Wearing "protective amulets" against them is more likely to cause problems that promote solutions.
and my fifi's got massively offended by the usage of the word "trump". my inner ninja karen is about to pull the facemask and do a reeeeeeeeeee mortal kombat finish move
Do yourself and your lineage a favor and research Dr Hamer's Five Biological Laws.
Saying virus particles are the cause of illnesss is like saying ashes are the cause of fire. Both are at the scene of the crime, and neither are at fault.
There are colds caused by influenza viruses, but because "the common cold is defined on the basis of its clinical presentation, a mild influenza infection can accurately be diagnosed as a cold, meaning that the two infections are not completely distinct disease entities."[0] Once someone with a cold tests positive for the flu, though, we would generally correct the description to a mild case of the flu and no longer say they have a cold.
[0] https://www.hmsreview.org/issue/2015/1/the-most-common-illne...
Is it possible that all coronaviruses, including the ones that cause a common cold, have a similar morbidity profile to COVID? Very minor infection in the young or those with previous exposure, extremely deadly in the old and naive. Except we all catch a bunch of colds in childhood, so nobody has to worry about a cold wiping out nursing homes.
We clearly don’t have the faintest understanding of the long-term dynamics of something like SARS, when all the conventional model parameters go to such extremes. And when the disease is evolving. And when people retreat inside and stop getting sun. And so on.
What constitutes a "cold"? Is there some kind of definition for it?
So I think you have an implied question as to whether there is some more specific meaning, the answer to that is no.
> The common cold, also known simply as a cold, is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects the respiratory mucosa of the nose, throat, sinuses, and larynx.
further down,
> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses being the most common.[13]
On the research presented in the original article, what predicted implications would this research have had for March 2020? I thought 2020 seemed like a fairly average year for colds up until March, when COVID spiked. Is that suggesting this benefit/effect weaker in a population than the test measures in a individual, or just that March could have been much worse across the world? (for example, was hypothetically Italy having a very low rate of colds at the time?)
That's exactly correct, and instead the poster is continuously misinterpreting a rate as a fixed quantity.
Influenza isn’t infective enough to spread during the summer months anyway (i.e. it is completely suppressed), unlike rhinoviruses, so it’s easily most plausible that a few additional hygiene measures have suppressed influenza further.
If you're saying that rhinoviruses are more contagious than the flu because they're less seasonal...there's really no evidence to support that. They're more-or-less the same [1]. It's possible that influenza is more sensitive to heat, light, etc.
My point is, the story isn't likely to be simple or reductionist.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020404v...
Flu has been eradicated by lockdown, but lockdown must continue because COVID has not. That appears to be the policy right now.
That said, if you're going to claim that all of these things we have done have eliminated the flu, you should take at least a few moments to reflect on the fact that they have done ~nothing to rhinovirus.
My limited understanding of that narrative is that COVID19/SARS-CoV-2 needs larger droplets to spread, and thus common masks help. But other viruses may be able to spread further as aerosols and last longer on surfaces, thus common/non-fine-particulate-filtering masks may not help.
There is quite a bit of pseudoscience on the internet that people don't really need glasses, they can train their eyes to work without them. See, for instance, the so-called Bates method[0], which had been well-debunked already in the mid-20th-century but, like so many quack claims, got a new life from the web.
I agree with you. Glasses and vaccine are great achievements of human civilization but I raised questions about freedom, biology and moral.
I'm not against vaccination I took many of them as a child and I have glasses which help and enhance me significantly but I'm not for mandatory vaccination or COVID passports that my European Union wants to enforce and I'm not for European Union limiting my human rights. We are going back to the days of Hitler where it was more important who you are "biologically" than looking at the fact that we are all humans and that we all have equal rights.
>Dr Murcia said: "Vaccination, plus hygiene measures, plus the interactions between viruses could lower the incidence of Sars-CoV-2 heavily, but the maximum effect will come from vaccination."
Vaccines are an end product of nature and evolution, too, and are much more reliable than hoping you always happen to get infected with rhinovirus near the same time you're exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
I agree with you but how safe is mRNA vaccine in the long term? I would rather take "classical" vaccine.
(But it's a good theory, who really knows, amirite?)
Because society has accepted liability for vaccine injury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj... and https://www.medicallicenselawyers.com/blog/covid-19-vaccine-...), it seems to me that it would be good for society for me to make the best choice for myself about the vaccine. Since society will pay if I get hurt, it would be best for me to weigh that in the decision to get vaccinated.
We've had vaccines since 1796 [0] when Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, a terrible disease that we fully eradicated thanks to vaccination. A disease that you and me don't have to worry about because of vaccines.
(Likewise for Cholera, Tetanus, Polio, Tuberculosis, Meningitis, etc)
Also, trains, cars, planes, cameras, lightbulbs and every invention of Edison are newer technologies than vaccines.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_vaccines
Also, my quick read of that paper was that it was mostly concerned with immunocompromised individuals, and with secondary pneumonia infections. Secondary pneumonia is certainly a problem for old people, or otherwise vulnerable people with colds. Antibiotics can be pretty helpful but they have limitations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3
R0 rates are just an indicative estimates. They don't account for different modes or vectors of transmission.
So it's not a given that mask wearing, social distancing, temperature, UV, humidity, and hand washing would necessarily all have identical effects on Covid, flu, and the various virus families that cause colds.
There's a pretty decent coverage of the level of uncertainty involved, but the reporter still can't resist the urge of "crafting a narrative" that bypasses the uncertainty. For example:
> In May...when some of the strictest lockdowns were in place, health workers noted an abrupt and early halt to the 2019–20 flu season in the Northern Hemisphere. That might partly have been an artefact caused by fewer people coming to a clinic for testing, experts say, but it was also attributable to the effectiveness of policies such as social distancing.
Pretty definitive statement, there. But not even two paragraphs later:
> “Some South American countries haven’t done such a good job controlling COVID, but even there flu is low,” says virologist Richard Webby at St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “I don’t think we can put it all down to mask wearing and social distancing.” He suspects that the dearth of international travel played a part.
So...yeah. We don't know the answer. The article makes it sound like we do. The headline and photo captions really makes it sound like we know.
Reporters are constantly putting their thumb on the scale by crafting editorially convenient narratives. Richard Webby's opinion doesn't properly emphasize the impact of of social distancing? Bury it under a vaguely definitive-sounding lede, and quote some other "expert" who does agree.
</rant>
What exactly have you been saying?
I feel I've gotten the best of both by doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
Given the history of shamanistic figures explaining the natural world in terms of magical spirits and having magical definitions replaced with natural ones thousands of years one can perhaps be forgiven for concluding that the original of life was just another domino waiting to fall.
Sources: https://www.qps.com/2020/10/05/covid-19-versus-the-seasonal-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246804271... https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1891
This literature review has estimates of R0 for flu running from 1.06-3.4, and rhinovirus running from 1.2-1.83:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020404v...
Given the uncertainties involved, these ranges are effectively identical, with flu maybe being a bit more contagious.
In the particular conditions we created in 2020, the Rhinovirus was better able to spread than the Flu. Why?
Because people were on the lookout for fever (and other things like continuous cough etc). Flu causes fever, and anyone who got a fever and was sensibly-minded would self isolate at least for a few days until they got test results or until symptoms abated. Whereas Rhinovirus is much less likely to cause a fever, so people twig that they've 'just got a cold' and carry on going about their day.
Especially for schoolkids - if they've got a fever, they're kept at home. If they've just got a snotty nose then they're likely to still go to school.
So Rhiniovirus was able to fly under the radar whereas Flu wasn't.
Why do you keep saying these measures have done nothing to rhinovirus?
The link you've shared does not support that. It shows relative percentages - and you're confusing that for absolute infection counts.
Unless you also believe that 60% of the population has a stomach virus on a daily basis (data from their other chart).
Because they haven't.
> The link you've shared does not support that. It shows relative percentages - and you're confusing that for absolute infection counts.
I am not confusing it. It shows you the percentage of samples they test that come up positive for rhinovirus (and other things. They test for all of the things listed, in parallel.)
Influenza A & B, RSV, and some other viruses have been virtually eliminated across their sampled population. The rate has dropped to zero. Rhinovirus has not -- the rate of detection is unchanged.
To use some simplified numbers to explain it - consider that normally 100,000 people are infected with some form of respiratory virus on a daily, basis and 20% of those are rhinoviruses, then that means there are 20,000 daily rhinovirus infections. And let's also say that strains of influenza are another 20% and 20,000/day.
Now what is happening, is in a covid world, due to masks and distancing, the number of people infected on a daily basis drops from 100,000 to 10,000. Rhinoviruses are sill 20% of that, but they are now down to 2,000. Masks and social distancing has had a drastic affect on them.
Influenza drops down to only 2% so only 200 cases daily. Masks and distancing have an even more drastic effect in influenza.
As a result, we're seeing exactly the graph you've linked.
Rhinovirus is 20% rate, but of a much smaller pie. And you're mistaking that as masks and distancing having little or no effect.
Both of those things are important to all of the viruses we have experience with.
For that to be true, you need some governing rule of life, not 'could easily be a widely used'.
(You'll note, I phrased my other reply in terms of us not knowing)
I generally think people look for "fancy" explanations for the trends, when simpler explanations (i.e. people weren't going to the doctor) work just as well.
> Now what is happening, is in a covid world, due to masks and distancing, the number of people infected on a daily basis drops from 100,000 to 10,000. Rhinoviruses are sill 20% of that, but they are now down to 2,000....Influenza drops down to only 2% so only 200 cases daily. Masks and distancing have an even more drastic effect in influenza.
Yes, I understand your hypothesis: masks make influenza go down to almost 0, but somehow rhinovirus ends up at exactly the same percentage as it was before. In other words: masks work exceptionally well for flu, don't work at all for rhinovirus.
This is a theory. It is...implausible...but if you want to believe it explains the patterns in the data, you're certainly welcome to do so.
I am not. It is a measurement of the percentage of samples in a surveillance network, positive for each pathogen. Here is the methods paper:
https://publichealth.jmir.org/2018/3/e59/
Here is the relevant section:
> To calculate the pathogen detection rate (as displayed in Figure 2 [second data view] and on the Trend website), we compute the rate for each organism at each institution as a centered 3-week moving average. To adjust for the capacity differences between sites, a national aggregate is calculated as the unweighted average of individual site rates. Only data from sites contributing more than 30 tests per week is included to avoid noise from small numbers of tests. Because the calculation of pathogen detection rate includes results from patients with multiple detections, the detection rate for all organisms can, in theory, add up to greater than one. In practice, this does not occur.
The data says exactly what I described: influenza prevalence has declined to nearly zero. Rhinovirus has continued to circulate at normal levels.
> The fact that rhinovirus continues to circulate so widely
This statement cannot be made from the link you posted. This is a rate. A frequency rate among sampled data. However it does not track the number of samples occurring. No amount of averaging can cover that. As a result, a person cannot make a conclusion to support the above statement on frequency of circulation of rhinovirus.
> Rhinovirus has continued to circulate at normal levels.
This statement is not supported by the data you list. The description you provide above even supports my argument. They are adjusting for capacity differences, but are still reporting a rate.
This is the key statement they make supporting my point:
> To adjust for the capacity differences between sites, a national aggregate is calculated as the unweighted average of individual site rates.
They are averaging rates of infection. You cannot use that to make the statement that you're making that "Rhinovirus has continued to circulate at normal levels."
This is all very well understood stats. The only thing I can suggest at this point is to do some background reading on statistics, sampling and statistical inference.
I'm trying to both be cordial about it, as you have been cordial in your tone and appear to have an earnest interest in this topic - but also trying to make clear that you are unintentionally spreading false information.
You are doing something that statistics 101 makes clear is invalid to do. I'm not certain how else to put it. My only request is that you refrain from repeatedly posting. It is incorrect information, and it turns out it isn't just an invalid conclusion, it's actually the opposite of what is occurring.
Keep the enthusiasm, but just understand the math/stats a bit more.
It does. Click the link [1]. Figure 2 [2] shows the number of samples. They explain it clearly:
> The FilmArray RP test utilization rate (TUR) metric is defined as the non-normalized number of RP patient test results generated each week across the Trend sites (computed as a centered 3-week moving average).
"Non-normalized number of RP patient test results" => count of samples
> To calculate the pathogen detection rate (as displayed in Figure 2 [second data view] and on the Trend website), we compute the rate for each organism at each institution as a centered 3-week moving average
They calculate positive rates for each pathogen, using the the number of samples as the denominator.
> They are averaging rates of infection.
They are not. They are computing an unweighted average rate across sites. Look at figure 2. Read the text again.
This surveillance data is showing you that the rate of samples positive for rhinovirus in their network is ~unchanged. The rate of influenza has disproportionately declined. There is nothing wrong with the data.
> Keep the enthusiasm, but just understand the math/stats a bit more.
Thanks for the advice.
A) Don't do the thing you don't want to (Vaccination)
- or -
B) Don't do the thing that having a vaccination would let you do.
That's still freedom of choice - you're free to decide what you want more. Having constraints on you isn't removing your free will.
As it stands, I’ll go to war today and die to guarantee my and your and everyone’s right to refuse, should TPTB actually try anything that stupid. Shouldn’t be a problem though, the people in favor seem to be mostly bullies making noise. They tend to shut up when you let them know that their only path forward is to start, and then try to win, a war.
You may want to remove the link in your profile where you express skepticism that we'll hit millions of deaths worldwide, as it's going to make people question your already questionable viewpoints even more.
This is basically the default position of every liberal (not in the misapplied American parlance) for at least 150 years now and surely far longer.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
John Stuart Mill, 1862
> skepticism that we’ll hit millions of deaths worldwide
Here’s the exact quote from the blog, in case any bystanders suspect that this person might not be arguing in good faith:
“Personally I don’t think that millions of healthy people will ever drop dead from one of these diseases in the space of a year, like they once did from a flu in 1918.”
> I’m just happy there really aren’t that many of you out there.
Should it come to the point where “dying for rights” is a real thing again (in America), I guess you’ll find out.
Whether its in the form of tax penalties, barred admission from public services, vaccination "passport" campaigns, or what have you, there needs to be a cost to associated with the damage your personal decision does to our society. If refusing a vaccine is truly that important to you, you are welcome to pay the cost. But I suspect many anti-vaxxers are simply societal freeloaders whose "principles" will melt away when they actually cost them something.
When the tide comes in while you're on the beach, do you stay and accept your fate? Or do you move?
What's so hard about taking a cautious approach and proactively increase your chances of survival? I.e get to higher grounds (floods), evacuating(hurricanes), get vaccinated (covid + new diseases?), etc.
WHO's dubious approach and dubious rhetoric only made me suspicious. I'm still waiting for their investigation on where and how pandemic originated.
Hope that helps clear up the misunderstanding. And if you have a link to the counts data also, do share!
"Those who will give up liberty for security [from a virus] will lose both."
We are, in fact, losing them now, so yes, now is the time to be willing to die for them.
Science is a matter of theorization and subsequent development of confidence through testing theorization.
It is arrogant and manipulative to view science as black and white and then call everything white due to a lack of 100.000% confidence.
We have many things labelled to be a theory that are complete enough to be acceptable answers while still being considered relatively incoherent or insufficient to science.
There is no thing called "science" that finds answers. There are scientists who can form hypotheses about the universe they can see and perceive and check whether they are consistent with what they can see and perceive.
We are mostly ants on a balloon:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-fact-tha...
We do not know where the balloon came from.
That’s equivalent to suggesting people can’t do chess. Semantically it may be accurate, but it’s intentionally obtuse.
Language doesn’t actually work that way.
Anyway, science isn’t experiments and building hypothesis etc. That’s part of the process, but really quite small pieces of a greater whole. It’s the long processes of generations refining and testing earlier ideas that finds truth.
What is supposed to be reproducible is the act of collecting and processing data to ensure that your conclusion isn't based on error, falsehood, or happenstance. What he is promoting is a basic misunderstanding of both science and logic.
People with preconceived anti science attitudes do this all the time. They face you down at high noon in their fancy duds, six guns ready at their hips sure of themselves and ready to kill and draw pearl handled.... water pistols.
They went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth and found cheaply manufactured baubles they are sure are deadly weapons because the very skills that would enable them to see it clearly would prevent them from looking for such easy answers in the first place.
It is very arrogant of any ideology to pretend it can explain things it can't.
Your statement "If it has an answer" only holds if you say that any truth science can't prove doesn't exist
But this isn't true. See Halting problem etc. There are things for which the answer can exist & yet be undeterminable
This is fine. I prefer to look at it this way: science is searching out a subset of knowable truths. The origin of the universe is interesting only insofar as we can dredge up relevant information, but coming up with an origin story or not isn't what proves the validity of science
Science isn't about getting all the answers, it's about getting the answers right & at it's best admitting when we got the answers wrong
When someone asks "If God doesn't exist what created the universe?" I say "I don't know, I don't care"
Islam passes with flying colors because it isn't superstitious.
You can say we can't possibly understand how the heart works because we do not understand the entire evolutionary tree leading up to the human race and how the circulatory system evolved over billions of years and ergo heart transplants are impossible. This is trivially false and its false for the same reason parent posters assertion is false. Everything is how it is because of initial conditions ergo everything connects back to time zero but we can still use the abstract understanding we do have to make models and predictions.
The initial conditions were so uniform that it doesn't take the same level of detail to understand what happened, and we can look all the way back to the CMBR. A particle-by-particle reconstruction of interactions since the big bang won't make much of a difference in our understanding of what happened on Earth. Virtually all of the interactions arrived in our solar system in a very noisy fashion during star formation and it was up to the resulting sun to pump negentropy into the rocks and other matter.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e2/f0/16/e2f0165777598a13c246...
Anvils would not be possible without the universe ergo we cannot possible predict solely on our knowledge of Warner Brothers physics and prior plot lines that the anvil trap he is laying will fall on his own head comically flattening him yet somehow leaving him alive and ready to chase the road runner again in the next sketch.
Our models don't capture every aspect of the world but good models capture enough to make increasingly good predictions about the past and future and the more we test them and winnow out the bad we approach but can never achieve perfection. The origin of life isn't inherently any different than the evolution of the continents, the planets, or the tree of life over the eons. No fundamental barrier stands in the way of our understanding. You didn't "close the debate fully". Nobody who didn't start out agreeing with you now does and its because they understand things you do not.
It is important to understand that scientists are individuals with individual incentives. While some have an inherent drive towards getting closer to truths via the application of the scientific method, others may find other things more important.
Abstracting "the science" from scientists is a convenient way of training other people in the acceptance of the proposition that there are inherently qualified arbiters of truth.
You can play chess, as in follow the rules, or be a scientist, as in contribute to the progress of science, but nobody is the physical embodiment of chess or science.
Edit: To be as clear as possible, the President isn’t Democracy, but Democracy still exists in that you can meaningfully destroy it.
I am afraid I am lost.
Science is similarly emergent behavior. You need the exchange of ideas, not just say a science fair where people go through the motions of experiments, but those experiments don’t get used by others to design new experiments etc.
I will also argue that atheism is a religion. There is nothing more exciting than being able to throw off the rules of one god by replacing him with another who asks for nothing.
Nature is like gravity it is a label we attach to things in order to communicate about some aspect of our mental models of the universe we share or imagine we share sufficiently to communicate theories about the underlying thing those models point to. It isn't in most cases not imagined to be a sentience modeled after ourselves but rather an abstraction around some aspects of everything in the overarching model.
Religion, Philosophy, Science are all systems of models of the world but they belong in different category based on characteristics in the same way that a trout, a dog, and an duck are all animals but they aren't all fish just because they all swim.
Religion especially western religion has classically been a pre scientific exploration of different theories about how the world came to be lacking virtually all actual understanding and focused on the idea that something much like man writ large was responsible for the universe and that the man who acted as conduit to the wishes off that man would derive some measure of that beings power mirroring primitive social structures and extending them skyward to the fanciful creations of our own mind. As if an ant had imagined the entire world was a giant burrow made by giant ants who could make their wishes known to lesser ants by way of the arrangements of your dogs droppings in your yard.
Science is merely a system for harnessing the same imagination but directed towards testing our fanciful explanations and building an increasingly powerful set of facts and models that are extremely likely to be somewhat true. We by the nature of our brains are builders of models and we must have them to exist and to progress but we don't need to build a system that glorifies the very flaws to which our minds are most heir to and exploits them. That is to say we haven't replaced God with nature we have simply built mental models of the universe that don't contain a first cause because we don't believe there is a conscious act at the center of it all.
Those of us who have wings know that a wing isn't a different kind of fin and a rocket engine isn't a different sort of wing and naked is not a style of pants.
There is no reason that we can't at the end of a long road have a pretty good idea how how life on earth came to be in the same way as we have a pretty good idea of how to continents came to be as they are. It wont be perfect but it will keep getting better every year as we learn more.
Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW. Throwing off the yoke of his adherents doesn't free one from the obligation of life, meaning, your family, or your fellow man. It is a harder obligation not an easier one. You incorrectly frame casting out comforting lies and facing down a terrifying truth as an easy way out but nothing could be further from the truth.
If a lie it is and I for myself call it a lie then adhering to it would be an unacceptable act of cowardice. If you truly believe it then to you it is courage to adhere to it but neither of our experiences is a lie and you definitely do not understand mine or any other alike.
Another fallacy and incorrect assumption that's clouding the discussion. Don't group all religions together then toss them all out as equally invalid.
They're not talking about personal experiences, they're talking about objective truth, and of those there's only one.
tl;dr At some depth, you ask questions beyond the scientific method itself.
For example
> science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science.
What followed in this thread wasn't a discussion of religion. The post you are directly replying to directly dealt with the charge that it is impossible to scientifically examine the beginning on life on earth because it wasn't reproducible and ergo not science based on your misunderstanding what reproducible means.
If you look again up thread you will see that religion was discussed in a different part of the thread. Did you mean entirely different statements were strawmen? If so what and again please be specific.
I have myself been very specific in the arguments I refuted so you can do the same.
People with preconceived anti science attitudes [..] went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth
This says "people", not "all religions". Moreover it says "people with [attribute]", which is a properly defined subset. If you take this statement to mean "all religions", it is you who is conflating "anti-science attitudes" with "all religious people", not the GP.
