We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

  > Not all texts are vague and open to interpretation. A proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like Islam has this issue figured out. The Quran itself calls out the issue, and Muslim scholars from the very beginning have a foundation on which to base rulings.

I don't want to claim all are vague. Many are. If the foundation though is based upon an arbitrary claim of a god and unprovable claims that such god spoke to someone and gave us some rules then I cannot subscribe to that concept because any other concept with arbitrary rules is equaly valid and I wouldn't know which one to choose. And if I can't know which one to choose then that means there is no right or wrong choice, it is arbitrary.

  > By living in society, someone is making choices on the behalf of another regardless of whether that society is religious or secular.

Correct. Some choices are sound and some not. A society needs to make a decision about each rule they impose in isolation and not based upon for example what a single person said was right or wrong. A good set of core rules for a society will naturally emerge after some time completely without religion. You can see this because completely seperated societies come up with same or similar rules but can have completely different religious believes or can be completely secular.

  > We're seeing it today. Look at the rates of depression, suicide, etc. in so called "developed first world" countries and compare them to war torn "third world" countries that are generally religious. Society is in moral and ethical decline, and it worries me how much longer this can go on before some chaotic event will take place.

Life expectancy and quality of life has improved drastically in (not only) western countries over time while at the same time turning more secular. Thanks science! You do not need religion in order to have a well functioning society. The western countries are not perfect - there's a lot wrong with them. Like the racism in the US for example. But there is also a lot wrong with for example middle eastern countries. What's up with all the fighting between religious groups there? I neither live in the west nor the middle east btw and don't think I have a bias because I don't count myself as part of either.

  > Without an authority, the very question of what "good" and "bad" mean becomes meaningless. I recall one atheistic head (might have been Dawkins) who claimed that rape is not good or bad, it just is a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Or Kraus (and others) who said that he could not find a moral justification against incest if there is consent from both sides. 

The concept of good and bad is the concept of morals. Morals can be deduced from logic and does not require religion. "We should do X because Y". The better we can explain Y, the higher the chance of someone subscribing to the logic and doing X. If Y is "because it is written in some book that some dude was told this by god" then many people might rightfully claim that they don't see the reasoning. I really really don't want to live under a religious authority that can impose arbitrary rules on me like that I have to pray five times a day and must not eat pork because I see zero logic behind that. Just to be clear: I don't want to single out Islam here but I am taking it as the example because I am argueing with you and you believe in Islam.

The fact that some atheists said or did something that most people will agree is wrong does not mean all of atheists are wrong in the same way. That's the same mistake the presenter in that video made. There are good atheists and bad atheists. There are good theists and bad theists. You cannot claim from any of these that either secularism or theism is good or bad.

>then there should be some kind of proof that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable

Sabine literally addresses this in the piece:

>"As I said earlier, you can always do this, because for any evolution law there will be some initial state that will give you the right prediction for today. The problem is that this makes a simple explanation more complicated, so these theories are not scientifically justifiable. They don’t improve the explanatory power of the standard cosmological model. Another way to put it is that all those complicated ideas for how the universe began are unnecessary to explain what we observe. It’s actually worse. Because you might think we just have to wait for better observations and then maybe we’ll see that the current cosmological model is no longer the simplest explanation. But if there was an earlier phase of the universe that was indeed more complicated than the simple initial state that we use today, we couldn’t use the scientific method to decide whether it’s correct or not. The scientific method as we know it just doesn’t cover this case. Science fails!"

There are countless of competing models you can invent that explain the beginning of the universe and everything you see, provided you make them sufficiently complex. The problem is, that's not science.

It's like saying: the standard model explains everything but the beginning. Let's say God caused the universe and then he went away. Technically that's an explanation, it doesn't violate physics as we know it, but it's not scientific. And given that we can't run repeated experiments on the early universe because we only got one, assuming the standard model explains everything but the early universe implies it is out of the reach of science.

Not really. Non-Abrahamic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. have nothing to do with faith or beliefs. Both Hinduism and Buddhism explicitly allows for atheistic sects within the religion. The religions are mostly concerned with philosophies of life and the nature of reality than worship of Gods based on belief and faith.

  > Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally?

Many. Science claims when I push the brakes in my car I will slow down due to the friction. Seems to be working pretty well so far. How does religion explain it?

You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science. That's not how it works. If I can pick a random claim and given enough time and effort can verify it with a high chance then I can reasonably be sure the other claims are most likely correct. Not all of them! There are scientific claims that are incorrect. We know because they have been shown to be incorrect. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of the claims. And yes there will be claims that I personally can't verify so I'll have to use my own judgement to trust them or not. Over time someone will emerge to prove them wrong if they are indeed wrong. Unless of course they impossible to falsify like the existance of god. But then I just can ignore that claim if it can't be proven either way - no matter if it's a claim in science or religion.

With religion I can't verify much at all. Can I verify the existance of god? Nope. Can I verify earth was created X thousand years ago? Nope. Can I prove that my prayer will get some result? Nope. So logically my trust in the other religous claims is very low.

We had science classes in school. Physics and Chemistry for example. I remember doing experiments all the time to check if something was really working the way it was claimed. It checked out every single time. We also had Religion classes. I don't remember a single time that we tried to verify a claim. Not even an attempt! How do you build faith in a system full of claims with no evidence? As we kids grew older and developed a stronger independent way of thinking instead of blindly believing what the teacher told us, more and more of us started questioning those claims and were left utterly unsatisfied and ultimately left the religion class and switched to ethics instead.

You love to use the strawman argument yet you use other logical fallacies like argument from authority in presenting the guy in your video, claiming he has this degree or this certification. I almost never bother to point this out but if you're going to call others out for logical fallacies, be aware of your own.