"Most dogmatic religions make concrete statements about the univese, and hence can be refuted"

I don't think you can refute an entire religion simply by refuting a few of its statements, unless it says specifically in its dogma that a refutation of one statement will be its downfall. If this were true, the failure of creationism would have to rule out Christianity entirely. No matter how hard you try, you can't observationally refute God. In addition, historical records of 2000 years ago are not nearly accurate enough to refute Jesus' miracles. I suspect anybody with basic Houdini-like skills could have convinced people they were a god, but I can't prove it.

"Okay, I'm just pointing out that this suffering would have taken place with or without religion (religion is not really the cause, so much as the method used by people.)"

Technically, everything cultural comes back to the people, but I don't think that people would be acting the same way with or without religion. I think it would be hard to convince people to run planes into buildings without some kind of religious motivation.

• The mountain is animal impulsiveness, not just skewed reasoning - carefuluniverse - November 9, 2002 - 20:35 UTC