I think at the bottom, one of the major causes of animosity against SOME religionist positions is the disavowal of the correct sources of things.

As anyone knows who has had his work stolen and used by others without due credit, it can be very embittering to have one's own source-hood denied or nullified.

Good works come from good people. So, ultimately, do good religions. The problem many people experience with religious cosmology is the notion that a Great Source, external to the being, should be acknowledged for all existence. This finds its ultimate expression in the ordinary dialogue of Muslims who, for example, greet all good news with "En'shallah", and who when spoken to of gratitusde for some favor, reply "Don't thank me, thank Allah." SOme Chriatian world-views are very similar. The whole notion that God has mysterious plans for you, and knows all, governs all, is the source of all, especially as it is often translated to small children, can easily become a very toxic and disempowering belief.

Granted it tries to offer an explanation for a set of phenomena that physics seems to have no answer to. But it seems patently clear that if the answers were closer to "truthiness" they would produce less arbitrary explosions, produce better results in application more broadly, and would not spin off so many radical alternative theories. Above all, they would aligbn with individual experience on a wider basis. BEing told that these analytical criteria need to be displaced by an act of faith is easily dismissed as copping a non-rational plea. While spiritual matters may not be measurable in the terms of phsyics itself, that is no reason why they should not be rational, and it often happens (because they often resort to authority alone as their fundamental) that the various religions we know of fail this test.

This is not to say that there is no such subject as spiritual matters; just that it has not been well-addressed in any demonstrable way, or at least has no widely used vocabulary that meets this test.

The theories of phlogiston and caloric fluid and aether and humors and the tides of the blood are all examples of parallel situations in the history of material science. The deathless line attributed to a London gentleman who attended the early presentation of the theory of circulation comes to mind. The young Dr. Harvey, who presented his research suggesting the hyeart was a pump and the veins, arteries and capillaries acted as pipelines for blood, was flying in the face of received wisdom going back to the ancient Greek father of medicine, Galen of Pergamum (AD 129 -c. 216), was a prominent Greek physician, whose theories dominated medical science for over 1300 years. So entrenched was the authority of Galen, who asserted the model of tides and humours, that this gentleman is alleged to have said "I would find it better to be wrong, but side with Galen, than to be right with Harvey.".

This is not to gainsay any of the good that comes from religous-based organization, nor to minimize any of the harm. People in every walk of life are often loopy, or spinny, or even whacky. But I think it is observable that when they have good data about their own situation they get a lot less loopy -- meaning data that matches up to experience and observation. And when they are working with bum data -- superstition, lies, authoritarian manipulations, false entities, distorted importances, or any other kind -- they tend to get even loopier. I could go on, but I doubt it will benefit any of us for me to rattle on.

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