It doesn’t matter what our out-dated, hate-filled, prejudicial doctrines and man-made mythologies might have said. There is no such thing as a ‘relig… - Aron Ra

There are still some things we haven’t quite worked out, but we know enough to be sure we’re on the right track. However apparently, our teachers are supposed to tell students that whenever we haven’t figured something out yet, we should stop our research and assume God did it—as if magic counts as an explanation. If we don’t yet know exactly how the first living cells formed, that somehow negates everything we do know to be true about evolution after that. But worse, creationists want to mislead our kids into thinking that every kind of life appeared all at once, ignoring all the evident stages of progression stretched across time, and all the apparent predecessors found in earlier strata. They want to teach as fact outright falsehoods easily disproved, as well as pseudoscience already publicly exposed in a court of law.

I was born in the richest, most technologically advanced (and consequently the most powerful) country in the world. We were the leaders in science, so of course we had a better economy, and we had a higher standard of living than anyone else at that time. The rest of the globe sent their best and brightest to enroll in our schools because our students were among the most inventive, innovative and involved. Some of the greatest American scientists were the immigrants who stayed and enabled the United States to achieve more than anyone else had in the history of mankind. That's when our secular government still cared about better education. Sadly, that is not the country I still live in. America was number one, but saying that now reminds me of Aesop's fable where the hare is still resting on its laurels long after the tortoise has passed. In the fifty years since I was born, America's rating in science has fallen from number one to number thirty-seven. We have one of the lowest science scores of all countries in the developed world (or first world). Foreign scholars and foreign scientists don't stay here long after graduation (if they come at all), because what sort of environment do we offer intellectuals now? Our own scientists, our own graduate scholars are leaving as well, moving to Europe or Asia where they're more welcome, although an American going abroad now means that he will have to try to live down new stereotype instead of living up to the old one.

Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case.