Well, this post combines shortsightedness with the 'discredited time and time again' argument that evidence based beliefs are just another religion.
Religion based beliefs are beliefs without evidence by definition and typically are not supposed to change though in reality they evolve all the time.
Evidence based beliefs are beliefs based on evidence (how profound) and they continually change as evidence accumulates. They are subject to error but the evidence acts as an anchor preventing cumulative group error from straying too far from reality for too long.
We have threads galore on this topic so resurrect one if you want to debate this yet again.
As far as needing another Universe to test the hypothesis we'd all be better off if there were no theists, I suggest breaking the problem down into smaller bits in order to look for the evidence. Religion offers some benefits in health and well being derived from belonging to a group and many many costs from the results of excluding everyone else from your perceived group.
What on earth are you on about?
Where did I say, or imply, that atheism is a religion or faith, or not evidence-based?
My post (which you plainly did not bother to read properly before launching into your standard harangue) was not about whether atheism is scientifically correct, but
whether there is evidence-based justification for the belief that it would necessarily (or probably) lead to a more rational, prosperous, peaceful and educated world, and should therefore be aggressively promoted. I specifically pointed out that these are not at all the same question. I don't think that's off-topic, as my objection (apparently shared by many others) to Dawkins's position on atheism vs religion is that he consistently conflates the two questions.
Ask yourself - what kind of 'evidence' are you expecting? Where are the controlled studies? The point is that the evidence can only come from social experiments that have not yet been performed. At the very least you would need to take two societies with similar characteristics and histories that have diverged in that one has become primarily atheist while the other hasn't (but not in any other significant way), study them for several generations and perform suitable measurements and statistics on some relevant quantities (intelligence, health, happiness, crime, violence and the like).
Now, I believe that any social question can (and should) be tackled in a scientific way
up to a point. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether religion increases or decreases the probability that a person will hold irrational beliefs in psychics, aliens, homeopathy, conspiracy theories etc. I suspect there isn't a general answer, and we can usefully investigate the interactions between the various social and personal factors involved. We can make some progress in these and related matters, but that still leaves an enormous part of the key question (whether or how society will be improved by universal atheism) that we can't hope to settle by evidence. We have to use our judgement, and the less judgement can rely on evidence the more it approximates faith.
Most of us manage to accept that unpalatable truth. For instance, I am a convinced, committed and to a limited extent proselytising socialist (and I have been taken aback by the irrational and fanatical belief in the free market shown by some US 'skeptics' here). But I have to recognise that my belief (or faith, if you prefer) that a planned, socialist economy can solve deep social problems that are intractable under capitalism, without introducing worse ones, can't be tested before the fact. (Also, it's a good idea to be aware in advance of the pitfalls, such as the danger of a dictatorship arising in a centralised economy.) The analogy is quite a close one, because capitalism as an economic system can be studied scientifically and found to be fundamentally flawed, but no amount of economic evidence can enable us to predict the
social consequences of such a profound transformation of economic relationships.
What 'evidence' we have on the improvement of society by the abandonment of religion is not too encouraging so far. In the UK organised religion has ceased to have any real significance for most people, but it hasn't been replaced by humanism, as the atheist movement of the early and mid 20th century hoped and expected. Instead we have a gang culture, racism, mindless consumerism and an explosion of new age nonsense. However, I don't conclude too much from that, because it's early days yet.
I am perfectly willing to debate these issues with you, but would you kindly address yourself to what I actually said, not to some bizarre distortion or fantasy.
