Yeah, sorry. You've been basically regurgitating long debunked and exposed theist arguments in this entire back and forth. This one, called Pascal's Wager falls apart because it is not logically consistent. All it does is focus on the possibility of -YOUR- god existing. If, for even one moment, you began to expand your argument to the infinite number of other conceivable gods, you would immediately realize why it is a worthless argument. As has been pointed out below, you are making the exact same wager every time you deny Mithra or Ra. People used to believe they existed too, but that doesn't mean you need to be afraid of their wrath any more than we are unafraid of your imaginary being's wrath.

Having grown up in several churches and observed the Christian society around me, this is exactly correct. It has become commonplace for Christians to constantly prattle on about how their religious rights are being stolen from them and how society is geared to promote some atheistic agenda. The reality is much less complicated of course; they are protecting outdated and disproved beliefs about the universe, so the majority of sources around them that convey actual facts about reality, naturally disagree with them. But because they have been brainwashed so thoroughly into their faith, they cannot even conceive that maybe they are just wrong, so instead they attribute it to some 'atheist materialist' agenda. Summary: when you believe in magic, reality is an atheist materialist agenda out to get you.

I'm not sure I follow what the incessant complaining about String Theory is. String Theory explains all data without being contradicted by any. If it is wrong, it will eventually be proven wrong when the correct theory comes around. Until then, if it proves useful and provides intuitive structures to understand things like entirely new phases of matter, it is serving a very real purpose. Despite this, I appreciate the skepticism of /. Science is skepticism. But let us never forget, science is also the ability to embrace things which once appeared wrong when new data suggests their correctness.

Atheism is not a claim about knowledge; Agnostic/Gnostic is. To be atheist is to say "I do not believe in a God", to be Agnostic is to say "I do not have knowledge of a God" These fit together. They are nested. Agnostic Atheist (I believe there is no God, but I do not believe I can have absolute knowledge of this) Gnostic Atheist (I believe there is no God and I know he does not exist) Agnostic Theist (I believe there is a God, but I do not believe I can have absolute knowledge of this) Gnostic Theist (I believe there is a God, I know he exists because I claim to have knowledge that he does) It's astonishing how much banter is had on this article by /.ers over silly terms that they don't understand.

Particle colliders help us understand quantum physics more intimately, which then therefore creates technological achievement. Science is about all types of theoretical experimentation, and in many occasions raw research initiatives without any proposed real-world applications. They may not always seem intuitively useful, but the knowledge that comes from them usually is. The computer we are communicating on, for example, has had leaps and bounds in efficiency based on mathematical models built from advances in Quantum Physics. The LHC is testing for information that is orders of magnitude more important than the FermiLab collider that came before it, and will likely give us information that will be orders of magnitude more useful and perhaps even revolutionary. The fact that the US did not decide to make the next largest collider is a testament to the fact that they are suffering as a scientific competitor, and soon it appears that mantle will be inherited to organizations like CERN who are willing to pursue knowledge.