The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims o… - Jerry Coyne

The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.

Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like “we don’t know God’s mind” doesn’t wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in a malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy. Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality.