As usual, great article. I especially liked this sentence: "Plainly, Jesus was a paradigmatic countercultural figure, which means the Christendom that followed in his name has always been a travesty, an abomination, a grotesque bastardization."

Human beings are flawed. Seriously flawed. They are wont to make a religion out of any teaching, whether it's science or the words of Jesus, Buddha, or you name it. Christianity as a religion has been nothing short of a destructive force through the centuries, though nowadays we hear Christians bemoaning that they have been the most persecuted people in history. It takes turning a blind eye to fact to make such an absurd claim, but such is belief.

Religion is divisive by its very nature. Whenever a strict system of beliefs is created it is done to the exclusion of all others; thus it is divisive, conflicted, and dead.

Though humankind has advanced technologically, spiritually/mentally/emotionally there has been no change in hundreds of thousands of years. This is because of the way the sense of self is formed and seeks to protect and perpetuate itself. Because this sense of self is fearful, petty, and clings to beliefs, all groups are a mere reflection of this microcosm of the self.

Science is a religion, no doubt. It is full of beliefs, a priesthood of sorts, ideas and ideals, baseless claims, and staunch ideas that are based on anything resembling its claim to use strict methodology (or documentation) to prove reality.

So what are we left with? The same entanglement of ideas that we have always dealt with. But ideas are arguable and cause arguments, conflict, wars, and human suffering. Such is our history as a species. We murder one another over stupid and unprovable ideas.

Science, like religion, overturns the norm in a revolution of ideas only to inhibit, persecute, and defame newer ideas that threaten the establishment that has concretized out of each preceding revolution.

I have to agree with you that Science and the Church (or any other religion) are more similar than different, and this is because they are belief systems invented by human beings, yet promising not to be mere inventions of the mind.