This post arose out of a twitter discussion related to faith-based beliefs and being humble...
I know enough to know there are billions of things I don't know and many more that I cannot know. I know enough to know that a skeptical position is usually more correct that one constructed of unsupportable beliefs. And I know that even well-supported propositions can still be wrong in light of future evidence.
I know enough to be able to read scientific papers and make some little sense out of them so that I can evaluate the truth value of claims.
I know enough to know that I should NOT mutilate a child's genitals out of my own ignorance. Or murder people because someone burned a book.
Humble absolutely! Which, for me, includes a rejection of religious dogma as the tripe that it is. It is the claims of religions that utterly fail at being humble.
"I KNOW the mind and WILL of god and you will do as I say - murder your first born child (Genesis 22), commit genocide against the nations who occupy this land that you just happen to want (Deutronomy 7), scapegoat your sin by this human sacrifice of 'my only begotten son' (2 Corinthians 5, et.al.), subjugate women, don't allow them to speak (1 Timothy 2), beat your child into submission 'spare the rod, spoil the child' (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), believe Genesis even I give absolutely not a single technical detail that creation happened exactly like this"
Is this your idea of Humble?
The bible fails the humble test AND it fails every scientific test of its supernatural claims (prayer, etc) AND it fails the history test (no contemporaneous historians cover Jesus or the MANY claims of the bible like saints rising from the dead, all NT books written far too late, not even eye-witness accounts, etc).
All you have on the side of "God" is the argument from ignorance. "Well, you don't know how it started so let's believe in God" and oh my GOD did they ever - what happened after 'Christians' got in power in the 4th century? Was it all peace and love? - I don't think so. And we only JUST get the Christians to stop murdering everyone and then Islam comes along to take it's place.
There are some spectacular 'secular' failures as well but I suspect only for lack of numbers and technology on the part of the earlier Christians (maybe it's a GOOD thing they were so anti-science for so long).
So evil people will do evil things - but non-belief doesn't COMMAND that you commit genocide after genocide as is clearly in the bible.
And I'm not saying that religion CAUSES evil - only that it has CLEARLY supported them in some cases and not just allowed but COMMANDED some pretty horrible things to go on.
Hilter (who was no atheist) and Stalin (raised with religion, but later turned savage and brutal - of course, he was abused by his father which doesn't generally create happy adults) were certainly horrible people and did horrible things. But they didn't do those things BECAUSE they rejected some god-claim.
And more importantly, where are they now? But (for example) Catholicism does horrible things and is allowed, not just to continue but is ACCEPTED. THAT is why religion is more dangerous to me.
The neo-Nazi's and KKK still exist in small pockets - but imagine if they were widely accepted! That is EXACTLY how I feel about the major religions. They are just as revolting to me. Doing a few things to try to make up for the evil you have done doesn't cut it for me - that goes for the KKK, the Holy See, and Hamas equally in my book.
You just don't get to buy your way out of your past crimes.
I could care less if there is some unknowable/unknown power that created the universe. The Humble position is leave the unknown as the unknown - not pretend to know some answer that clearly has it's origins in blood, superstition, and ignorance.
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