> Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones
I have been downvoted many times (not sure why?) for stating this on HN, but I will state it again:
It's sad that this line of thinking has taken over the modern time. We now have "science", so we don't need any of that silly stuff like "philosophy" or "art" or "religion". All can be explained through the scientific method and all other branches of human intellect are null and avoid.
Of course, this comes from the new Atheists who influenced a lot of the younger generation years a go when they started but their ideas actually stems from older philosophers who shaped the modern day thinking.
Mainly Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also influenced by Feuerbach), Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
For example, What did Jean-Paul Sartre say? "Existence precedes essence" and you can _clearly_ see how this has affected the modern Atheism mentality in the 21st century.
If existence precedes essence, then everything is relative and nothing can be objective and absolute; thus to claim things such as objective morality in the way that religion does is meaningless.
Don't forget that Sartre said: "If God exists, I can't be free, but I am free. Therefore God does not exist". Once again, if you look carefully enough, you absolutely see this in the modern world. The New Atheists for example, took all their ideas and spread them from these philosophers. What was Hitchen's famous quote? He would constantly regurgitate Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people" which again.. is rooted from Sartre philosophy.
There is a great talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQcm0Mi5To
More to it, to anyone who claims religious people are intellectual inept, I would simply challenge you to read any of the material written by the intellectuals of the tradition. For example, for Christianity they would be: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman and tell me you're dealing with someone who has suspended his critical faculties.
You are welcome to disagree with them of course, but to claim that we should simply replace these materials with math books is disingenuous.
Just my 2c.