I think ground zero in the security war always begins and ends with the spam industry, which seems to be at the forefront of exploitation.

You are confusing history with religion.

The bible also describes pi as being 3.0 - does that make it a math book? It also gives instruction on how to beat slaves. Does that mean it's a medical text? It provides details on what the fine one must pay if they kick a pregnant woman and cause her to lose her fetus. Does that make it helpful to economics?

God = Psychology
Religion = Economics

Your argument is analogous to suggesting people call themselves a vegetarian and still eat meat. Most religions are mutually-exclusive of each other. Why attach a label to yourself that for thousands of years has been used as the impetus to oppress others?

The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.

You just employed a Begging the Question fallacy. Science can and does routinely disprove religion, from the origins of life in the Book of Genesis to the ancestry of Native Americans in the Book of Mormon. Almost every religion has some material claim that can be tested and thus far, there's been no non-circumstantial, material evidence to indicate any supernatural claims are true. The onus is on those who believe to prove their claims are legitimate. Not the other way around. We don't have to "disprove religion", you have to prove, for example, that prayer makes a difference, and numerous scientific studies have shown that claim to be false. So science can and does disprove numerous religious claims. Can science prove god doesn't exist? No, and it's not our responsibility to do so, and regardless of whether or not we prove you wrong, that still doesn't mean your beliefs or supernatural claims about the origin of the universe are correct. That's a burden you must back up instead of trying to shift it upon the skeptics.

the word 'faith' and correct me if I am wrong, but if something has no ontological status, you cannot argue for or against it.

Correct... until someone's faith-based beliefs intersect with the material world in the form of specific claims. Then their beliefs can be tested and proven or disproven, including:

* The power of prayer - Disproven by the Harvard Prayer Experiment.

* The creation myth of Genesis, disproven by numerous areas of science

* The origin of native Americans as dictated in the Book of Mormon, disproven by genetic science

* The claims of scientology, disproven by analysis of their e-meters other science fields

Religion has never been content with merely residing in a metaphysical realm, and that's when problems arise.

Everyone believes in science; not everyone believes in religion.

So technically, "science" is everyone's "religion."

Science centers around making decisions based on observation, testable and repeatable practices. 99.9% of what you do every day is dependent upon these constructs. If this were not the case, then people would try to jump off buildings instead of taking an elevator down; they would assume any substance could cure any illness, etc.

Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial) Albert Einstein (1954) Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh...

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein.

Ref: http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Image:Einstein_letter.jpg

One was made by God (Science)

[citation needed]

It says scientists at elite universities got that way by being diplomatic and avoiding unnecessary confrontation and controversy. It also says Slashdot readers are more intelligent. It's well established that the more intelligent one is, the more likely they are to subscribe to religion.

207 economics
225 political science
205 psychology

My guess is the vast majority of polled non-atheists are members of the above groups, most of which don't typically participate in standard scientific studies using the scientific method.

The '"insurmountable hostility" between science and religion is a caricature

Not really. Science is based on testable theories and evidence. Faith is belief despite there being evidence, or in many cases in spite of contrary evidence. Science has dispelled everything from evangelical christianity (proving Genesis to be false) to Mormanism (proving Joseph's Smith's revelations are phony through Egyptology and DNA evidence). There's ample evidence to indicate that religion evaporates in the light of science.

"I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore."

Apparently you can.

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, AT&T's network was totally down. Other providers such as Sprint and Verizon were online, but AT&T customers were completely left dark for weeks at a time.

In fact, yesterday and today, we had flooding in parts of the city and once again, lots of people lost their phone, POTs and DSL services in the region (AT&T recently took over Bellsouth and now the quality has dramatically decreased).