Since I appear to have this thread to myself now, I might as well just carry on.
IMO, you seem to suffer from a substantial case of confirmation bias yourself, with a series of definitions which expand and contract, as needed, and a liberal dose of "some" and "most" as strategic disclaimers.
...then it is absolutely inevitable that some people who accept that belief system will commit acts of atrocity against people who do not.
It seems equally obvious that
some will not. So too, while it may be true that "hospitals are
most commonly built for reasons which are not religious," hospitals built and sponsored by religious institutions are legion. The Catholic Church, for example, currently cares for 25% of the worlds population of AIDs victims -- and I may have that percentage too low.
By the time your anti-rational snow ball gets through rolling downhill, you've defined faith as virtually any erroneous belief whatsoever, conflated the religious with the evangelical, and included virtually anyone and everyone who ever done someone else wrong -- along with a lot of folks who haven't -- in your own cosmology. With apologies for the mixed metaphor, I think the broader the brush in this instance, the less useful it becomes.
The problem with subscribing to faith-based cosmological systems without evidence is that they lead, when they come into competition, to all sorts of reprehensible acts of atrocity.
Oddly enough, what has really struck me reading through this thread is that you are the one who seems the most determined to pose scientific and religious cosmologies as inalterably opposed competitors, the most inclined to take your own joyful experience of the physical world as the universal end state to which all
ought to aspire, and the least tolerant of those who defend spirituality as both a natural and legitimate dimension of human perception.
You get there with all sorts of unsupported assertions:
Faith describes tiny, limited worlds; the reality is majestic and beautiful beyond imagining.
One could just as easily substitute science for faith in that formulation. I'm sure Dawkins is working on it, but the imagination seems perversely resistant to scientific inquiry.
If you start with the premise that we are fallen from grace, created perfect by a perfect divinity and then corrupted, then we are doomed to being nothing more than we are right now.
I'm not sure how you get from your premise to your conclusion. It looks like the only place to go from there is up. Both science and religion suggest that we can make improvements in our natural state as we go. Indeed, that concept may actually be more central to religion than science, where simply
understanding is often an end in itself, and where the fruits of exploration can also be perverted in the service of atrocity. I doubt you would stipulate to the inevitability of the latter though, would you?
One of the things I find most fascinating about religious faith is the notion that there is no awe and majesty in the universe without supernatural divine power.
It would take conjuring up a logical pretzel to support this assertion, but what interests me is that you almost seem to be saying that the world is more
miraculous if you take a divine creator out of the equation.
Some people find that frightening, and want to put limits on how high we can fly. Those limits are almost invariably called 'god'.
Or "reason."
I don't think your own arguments here are free from hyperactive pattern matching, misunderstood correlations, and teleological promiscuity, but this post is long enough already, so I'll just leave it at one last comment.
Your example of "misunderstanding correlation" seems peculiar, when in fact there is a cause and effect relationship between toxins in food and sickness, whether sufficient evidence yet existed to prove it scientifically or not. While your numbers 2 through 5 can be part and parcel of confirmation bias and other potentially dangerous errors, they are also part and parcel of the impulse toward scientific exploration. While I do understand your premise here, I think you have a lot more evidence gathering to do before it satisfies your own parameters for ostensibly settled science or falsifiable conclusions.
