Losing Our Religion

I could never really relate to atheists like Weinberg or Nietzsche in the way that they miss it or feel a loss.. Religion in my life was always kind of a burden. My parents weren't too religious, but I grew up in a small Louisiana town (in fact, Marguerite Perrin from Trading Spouses lives in this area), and I ended up associating it with body/mind starvation. To this day, I still wonder, why isn't the journey of life enough? I get pleasure from learning, being recreational, creating, meeting and conversing with people, being with family, etc. I've learned to take the good with the bad because without the bad, there would be no good (as cliche as that sounds).
Of course science won't give you meaning.

I could never really relate to atheists like Weinberg or Nietzsche in the way that they miss it or feel a loss.. Religion in my life was always kind of a burden. My parents weren't too religious, but I grew up in a small Louisiana town (in fact, Marguerite Perrin from Trading Spouses lives in this area), and I ended up associating it with body/mind starvation. To this day, I still wonder, why isn't the journey of life enough? I get pleasure from learning, being recreational, creating, meeting and conversing with people, being with family, etc. I've learned to take the good with the bad because without the bad, there would be no good (as cliche as that sounds).
Of course science won't give you meaning.

Religion is necessary for those who require an invisible means of support. It is extremely logical to me that humans do not have a biological connection to a god, but more a sub-conscious, philosophical need. If someone feels better in church or temple, and it affects their behavior in a positive way, then I am for religion. When humans use religion as a tool to change others behaviors, as in the the political realm, than, I am against religion. We have religious freedom here in the USA - also freedom from religion. Anyone can follow their religion as long as others are not hurt. The problem comes when one religion claims to be the only true religion. That then excludes all others and has caused irrefutable harm over the centuries. Diversity is not the friend of the church. Tolerance is the greatest religion

People often don't seem to understand that science is merely a method for looking at the universe in which we live; a set of rules for defining facts and discarding fictions. Sometimes scientific facts themselves become fictions as we further our investigation of the Universe. Science doesn't require anyone to believe anything. I do evolutionary biology, so people ask me, "Do you believe in evolution?" That's like asking, "Do you believe in gravity?" Science doesn't care whether I believe in evolution, or gravity, or thermodynamics. Science only asks, "Does it work?" I don't believe in gravity. I do believe that I will get hurt if I jump off a building, so I avoid jumping off buildings. I do believe that medicines based on evolutionary biology work better than waving gourds, so I take the medicines and keep the gourds to decorate my living room. If you fly in airplanes, take modern drugs for illnesses, eat the bounty of modern agriculture, use computers to calculate taxes, and rely on autos to get you to the beach, you're expressing--for better or worse--similar confidence that scientific knowledge "works." And by extension, confidence in the scientific method that gave us the both the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution. Scientists didn't start out collecting data to prove evolution. They started out collecting data to document the story of creation. As accumulating scientific data overwhelmingly contradicted the old stories, scientists discarded the stories. You can do evolutionary biology or any other science without any belief in it at all as long as you rigorously follow the rules of scientific inquiry. In fact, otherwise good scientists often do really bad science when they replace intellectual honesty and humility with a belief in a particular theory or outcome.