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Well, there certainly is such a thing or things (networking and websites/forums, adherent seminars, books/media on the topic, even atheistic satanist 'churches'), but I don't believe anyone was implying you were a part of such organization or movement in any structured sense. Scientism is also kind of a thing, although not formally organized it certainly has its priesthood, doctrine, deification, FAITH, and so on (particularly as of late) - a religion by any standard looking in on the outside.
Probably a good idea in general. If not always. Although there's something to be said about the message > messenger.
"Scientism" filling a role of religion to some people doesn't make it a religion by any standard. It may function as one for those people, but the consequences of any sort of comparable dogma doesn't have anywhere close to the implications that actual religion has IMO.
This is too absolute. Religion basically exists as form of proto-science, a system of meaning. If you remove that entirely from the history of humanity, there's no way to know anything about what life would be like. It's likely that this "meaning" that we require as a species is what creates systems of belief in the first place. We needed bigger brains for evolutionary reasons, and "meaning" is a byproduct of that. I'm not placing undue importance of it either, as if you remove something as simple as the dog from the history of humanity, our lives would be incredibly different due to that alone.
I mean, ultimately the problem is people and how they treat religions/differing points of view, otherwise I do think religion can be good, like how it made HBK a better person.
If you go by evolutionary biology, our brains became larger out of a need to develop and understand language. Communication becoming important resulted in things like religion existing as an explanation of the natural world. As far as we can tell, that's something uniquely human (or at least primate). It could very well be that this is a chicken and the egg scenario. We might not have become "human" without this.
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Oh, I thought it was for many reasons, like communication and needing to adapt intelligently to survive. I also read that elders came up with the concept of spirit/god because they had no idea how things worked and didn't want to lose face, so they figured lying was better.
Yeah it's several things, but communication is probably at the heart of it. We don't know if it was "lying". Take a smartphone back a thousand years and they'd have no rational explanation for that either. Plenty of very smart people had reasonable justification for not thinking the solar system was heliocentric until Copernicus came along.
They'd say God or the spirit made the device for whatever reason, I guess.
The only thing that could make me change my mind is God or a deity himself appearing before me and proving he's real. Nothing less.
