Bill, there ARE scientists with profound spiritual understanding. There always have been. They are not the straw men I was referring to in the least. Science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. They support one another.

But when I see people concocting laughable "scientific" arguments to dismiss an already laughable concept of God that they themselves thought up or assumed in the first place...then I get sarcastic. They make up an idiotic notion about God, and assume that everyone who believes in God must subscribe to that same idiotic notion. Talk about a closed circle of reasoning!

The problem is this: An initial level of prejudice which does not even consider the possibility that the "other guy" might know something you don't know   It's the same thing that has traditionally poisoned good relations between different religious groups, such as Protestants and Catholics or Christians and Muslims. It's cultivated ignorance, cloaked in an assumption of innate superiority. Given such an assumption, the "other guy" must be very, very stupid, if not downright evil. Therefore, everything that he believes in can simply be discounted as utter foolishness...or worse. Upon these grandiose prejudices are wars launched and straw gods declared to be non-existent. And of course, straw gods ARE nonexistent. But who made them up? Atheists compose a straw god the moment the concept of God crosses their mind, and then think how intelligent they are to have realized that it is a manfactured falsehood.

- LH