I am atheist... My defense of religion is only in respect to the comment made that "there's no reason to believe in it.". And I didn't "slip up". I very deliberately said "social superiors". The social hierarchy is important among social animals. We take pleasure when our betters are pleased with us.

Religions tend to codify and enforce the primal social rules we already instinctually obey as social mammals. These rules then become god's law. Obeying the rules well, and pleasing our social superiors gives us pleasure and makes us healthier. This isn't a "dubious psychological benefit". It's a well known fact that being happy and accepted by your peers is important for survival. There's a reason that we all have innate fears of peer disapproval. When the tribe is unhappy with you, you get the scraps they leave behind. If the tribe is really unhappy with you, they leave you behind, and then you die.

More like subscription bait.

Nah....memes are the DNA of culture. Religion is just a meme.

There most certainly are some reasons. There are some psychological benefits to faith. It is also a good way to socially bond a group of people...and a socially bound group has obvious survival advantages.

The universe obviously.

You seem to be have some kind of demonic picture in your head about what an atheist is. Simply not believing in a deity does not magically transform everyone into a cunt, you know.

That's one version of beauty. It's more like sexual attraction than beauty though.

Yeah, but they would have a controlled descent in this scenario and would have radioed for help, wouldn't they?

I'm not anything close to an expert, but wouldn't a stall be easily recoverable at 32,000+ feet? If a plane fell from this altitude without any radio contact I would think it would be some kind of catastrophic structural or mechanical failure.

There are reasonable responses, and there are unreasonable responses. The police usually lean toward the unreasonable responses these days. They smash in the door with guns blazing when the only indication that something is amiss is a single phone call from an anonymous source.

I don't understand. Which part of this says there's nothing special about Dec 25th?

Why can't we? I don't understand your reaction either. It doesn't seem insulting to me. Just seems like an interesting fact delivered in a clever way.

It was implied that it was expensive due to the rocket equation...implying the cost cannot be brought down due to constraints imposed by physics...That is the bullshit. Yes, it'll still be expensive. But the shuttle program was deliberately expensive.

Oh bullshit. Space is still expensive because the US government doesn't want anyone else up there. It's actively working against making space exploration any cheaper. The Russians can put stuff into orbit for a fraction what the US can do it for....but you hardly ever hear anyone dwelling on this fact. And if you do, we just say it's because they have substandard technology. What the Russians actually did was go with the cheapest design possible and reused it again and again.

The US could have done this too. But we insisted on 30+ years of the shuttle. Americans still believe the shuttle is better and think a capsules are antiquated and inferior to the shuttle. The think the space station could not have been built without it. Well, how hard would it have been to build a Mir style space station with lots of Skylab sized components....on Saturn rockets...forty years ago.

Perhaps this is the best argument for abandoning the manned space program. The government clearly has no interest in it accomplishing anything with it.