The "should" part is all well and nice, but if your wallet is gone and nobody's seen the thief well then there's no justice for you. The thief knows he got away with it and he doesn't have to face justice. Maybe I'm a pessimist but if there was no law, no police, no justice system of any sort I'm thinking it'd be more like Somalia than Kumbaya land. I think we all know that even in civilized society a lot of guilty men walk free, because they were never convicted or even a suspect. The carrot and whip is the only thing keeping them at bay, and if you believe in God then heaven and hell seems like a bit bigger than jail time. Funny you should mention children, because we have our own little children's version of that. Let me quote:

I guess you'd better hook them young on the belief that someone always knows if they've been naughty or nice. Funny how people think they leave all their "childish" beliefs behind then think exactly the same about Jesus.

The Nazis were stopped because they picked a fight with everyone in sight and bit over more than even they could chew, internal resistance was not a major issue until long after they had lost the critical battles of the war. Had Hitler stopped in May 1941, consolidated his forces and concentrated on blockading the UK while holding against the Soviets - who'd be totally crazy to attack - things would be very different. The US like to play up their part in WWII but the Nazis took 80% of the casualties on the Eastern Front, not the Western. Around ten million Soviet soldiers died in desperate defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and the oil fields to the south as well as an extremely harsh winter, that's what broke the Nazi army. You'd be surprised to know how many like racism as long as they're the superior race, and the inferior were quickly silenced.

MAYBE if you actually read a book you might learn WHY Muslims have such high need of FEMALE doctors. That is because female patients have to be seen by a female doctor or not at all. The statistic sounds so nice but underneath it is a regime of segregated care where QUALITY of care was of no importance whatsoever.

And 60% of doctors also tells you nothing of the total number of doctors available OR that women (childbirth) need doctors a LOT more then men.

Careful with your statistics young one, they can be tricky things and easily be used to fool you.

Maybe it's different where you live but I don't perceive most religious people as scared. Most of them just want some sort of direction or purpose in life, something that gives meaning beyond eat, sleep, fuck and die. Someone to praise for the good things, pray for help with the bad things, that God has some sort of mission for them here on Earth not just an afterlife. And I don't mean that you have to go out and convert people, but to try living a life without sin and asking for forgiveness for your sins is a mission in itself. It's not that unlike sports, nobody tell me that in the greater meaning of things football "makes sense" - it's just an arbitrary set of rules we've turned into a game. But then we can play by those rules, we have some sort of measuring stick that says this was a good play and this was a bad play. Religion does that for your whole life, my life is now not just different than yours but it's now better than yours.

Science is great but it's also empty, there's nothing in physics or chemistry or biology that give any sort of purpose to life. There's no values, no ethics, it can perfectly describe what a bullet will do if you pull the trigger but there's nothing telling you if you should or shouldn't do it. Okay you can say evolution "wants" you to reproduce but that's not really true, it doesn't care if you don't. Why should it or how could it, it's only a game of numbers. There's humanism but it really only covers your interaction with other human beings and it mostly boils down to reciprocity because nobody wants to be treated as less than average but there's really no penalty for taking advantage of others if you can. Religion tends to be divine both in matters of fact and matters of law, there's no "getting away with murder" with an omniscient God. Seeing human courts sometimes failing miserably, I can see the appeal I just can't buy into the fantasy.

Leakey's included: This is not out of character for him. I lived in his native Kenya for a while, and he's often saying similar things, about the superiority of science over religion. He's a good scientist, but he's a kook on anything else, and doesn't know when to shut up.

Well, Occam's Razor favor's the simplest explanation...

Evolutionist (courtesy of wikipedia):

Bible literalist / creationist:

Besides, it's a general principle not a scientific fact, sometimes the answer is not the obvious one. You can't use it to say you're right and they're wrong.

And given sufficient liberal interpretation, Nostradamus isn't wrong he's just.... vague. A lot of the things in the Bible don't have and won't ever have any basis in fact. Take for example Noah's ark and that the flood covered all the mountains, no never was there a 8850 meter high flood all over the world. Not even the dinosaur killer created that kind of tidal wave, and besides there was no wave just unending rain. Oh and don't forget Noah must have traveled the world collecting everything from elephants to polar bears to penguins, because all other life perished. Fair enough, some parts of religion like souls and afterlife and whatnot are beyond science, but pretty much all religious text make plenty real-world claims that can be tested. Most of them fail pretty miserably.

To be honest, I'd not have a big problem with Webkit becoming the reference implementation for HTML. For one it's trying pretty hard to stick to the standard and if all else fails you can look at the code to see what the hell it's doing. Comparing that to IEs black box layout where I've been doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments waiting for the one pixel to turn my entire layout into monkey barf isn't even on the same planet. As long as they don't fall into the "yeah this is wrong but we can't fix it because that'd break too many sites" crap. Fix it and the crappy web developers who've relied on buggy and incorrect behavior will have to fix their shit, I don't have a problem with that.

If you'd like to believe healthcare is so expensive in the US because so much of it goes to medical R&D go ahead, but I don't think that has much to do with reality. It pays for a lot of health insurance companies, lawyers, drug marketing and a ton of CYA tests and procedures as well as payola all around, of course yes on a global scale the US is a rich country and buys many expensive drugs but not more than expected. What you do have is some incredibly wealthy people which may advance the state of the art in the best care money can buy, which can have trickle-down effects into general healthcare, but not the 99%. They just have an inefficient and expensive system.