A fine choice for the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology

[Ironside]

Defense can be a good method of offense.

When your enemy's enemy isn't your friend, pick your battles carefully. Results of victory may vary.

Some people need to feel like their moral compass is rational and logically cohesive, and can't comprehend anything else. You don't think this is bad, it's something you'd praise about a moral compass?

I was refering to those who say that atheists can't be moral because any ethics they come up with doesn't have a divine mandate. The reverse attacks what they find as silly supersticions, but treat the ethics as a seperate issue.

I wouldn't say that science has done that, it's more like a secular culture that need not have existed at the same time as secular advances. But I'm not talking about loss of religion in slums.

Religious people have adjusted and changed their beliefs practically continuously, for all they are accused of being dogmatic. God and inspiration have usually been seen as a higher authority than bible doctrine--when you bring up the different sects you support that.

The bible was used to justify slavery, as was science, but it was largely evangelism that ended slavery (in the us/uk).

It's rather a consequence of the church having the highest authority on natural science for a very long time. Now the problem with bringing the old religions back on a massive scale is that it's not consitant enough to sustain without massive indoctrination, obfuscation and suppression nowadays. And you still will have faithless people. Yay!!
See, saying this is bad is a call for introspection, which is somewhat built in the system in the case of science. Saying anything more needs to give a practical alternative.

If you want to justify a vice, it's easy to rationalize or misuse science. You can take some theory as true, or some absurd premise as true, and be confident that you have built logically on top of that. People who want to justify vice don't usually become satanists.

Some do become satanists, some use the Bible. See point above, any system is easy to misuse.

Moral and other big questions are usually deeply passionate. But science is supposed to be dispassionate. To science nothing is sacred. But imagine a moral philosophy which didn't consider human life to be sacred.

Not familiar with any religion outside Christianity I take it? Human sacrifice, the Bible dumped that but have God doing and demanding genocides, Hinduism etc, etc. Man that was hard to imagine. Yes, the ethics has improved, but that's not something religion can celebrate (Christianity has been better than most on this matter though).
Science is a tool. Moral philosophy is moral philosophy. You can use the tool to help your moral philosophy, but that's about it.

It will only be helpful if it's right. And if there isn't widespread comprehension, how will the truth spread over society?

Using science or a data driven approach to find the answer to the big questions doesn't work. Neither does the overly rational and logical approach. As an analogy, think of the people who try to use science or logic to figure out something social like dating.

That's a nice one. Science and logic are not anywhere close to replace the real thing, but it'll help to filter out wich one of the tips you picked up from media, family and friends that's actually useful (and that's not counting that those tips are science in a broader way, since it's data gatering). There's thousands of situations that you might experience or not, where science can be a helpful starting point. There's also many situations were you'll have to pick the girl without dating them first, so to speak. How does Sasaki do it then?

If it's very difficult to truly grasp the big questions then we should avoid everything that tends to fool us into thinking we have the answers. It's absurd to pick out creationists as a special kind of dogmatic and then (essentially) praise college kids going off of what their professor tells them about the latest psychology study.

Because coming up with the idea 200 years ago, that a 2000-year old book should be taken as the literal truth (except when it doesn't), sounds reasonable? And the main difference is yet this: According to the principles of science, the college kid is doing it wrong if he's taking the latest scientific study as gospel. According to the principles of "science" based from fundamentalism, the college kid is doing it perfectly correct if he's taking creationism as gospel.

I don't know how it is in Sweden, but in America the people who don't go off of tradition or religion simply turn to some other authority--they are the ones who quote from newspapers admiringly, who speak the names of 20th century philosophers and artists reverently, the ones who say "studies show that people...".

Interesting, that might actually be a discussion difference if that's common in the US. Authority refencing isn't that common here, unless it's really needed.

Anyway:
Tradition: ...Right, the big questions, we solved those ages ago, the answer was... Look a big wizard in the sky! "Runs away."
Religion: We've been thinking about this a lot and the answer is... The big wizard in the sky did it, using diamonds!
Science: The big wizard in the sky holds all the answers? Amazing! Do we have any real, useful data on him? No? Booring! Wake me up when you do.
Scientists: It would be really cool to know all the answers that the big wizard in the sky is supposed to know. Let's try! Even if we fail we might learn something.
"Moral" philosopher: The big wizard doesn't exist so we can make up what we want.
Moral philosopher: Let's try to generalize the best ideas the big wizard is supposed to have, mix it and see if we can get a better standard.

There are no clear answers on the big questions, that's part of why they're big. And any tool is flawed. But more information is always helpful and in sometimes it can even give an almost full answer.