Take that, people with beliefs!

Scienticians now say that there is no afterlife and that if you believe in one you are, statistically speaking, an idiot.

Above: Idiots (source: science).

"Wait, what's...son of a dammit!"

-Everyone who's ever

played Mega Man

According to Jimo Borjigin, the phenomena associated with near-death experiences are just the brain freaking out before a complete systems failure. Sort of like when your NES glitches and goes all janky before freezing right as you're about to beat Dr. Wily in Mega Man, except you can't blow on the cartridge and hit reset. Seeing your dead loved ones, looking down at your body from above, all that's just a hallucination before you blink out of existence. There is, says Borjigin, literally no light at the end of the tunnel.

"Here's to the cold, godless void!"

-Smart, successful people

Bummer, right? But say you're still not convinced that life is a meaningless struggle against the inevitable and that all that comes after is nothing but worms and decay. Miron Zuckerman and a research team from the University of Rochester looked at decades of scientific studies and found a "negative relation between intelligence and religiosity." And it's not just that people with high IQ's are too smart for religion, it's that they are (on average) so much more successful and complete as human beings that they don't need it. 

"Oh yeah? Well you're all going to hell. Ha!"

-Religious communities react

to Zuckerman's study

You know, as an agnosto-secular-Vulcantologist, I don't have any particular faith to destroy, but science can kind of be a dick sometimes. Sure, religion sometimes (ok, often) deserves it, but what's the point of Zuckerman's research? Is he trying to dissuade people from their beliefs? Because calling people stupid is not going to win science any converts, and if he's trying to give atheists something to be smug about, trust me, they don't need any help. Alright, religion isn't very scientific, so what? There's lots of things that people do and feel that aren't scientific or rational.


Take the hew-mon emotion we call love. We put all these cultural constructs like marriage and Valentine's Day around it because A: companies like Hallmark and Godiva enjoy making money, and B: we don't like to think of ourselves as animals acting out an evolutionary imperative to screw and continue the species. 

"We are gathered here today to celebrate Nicole and Steve's fucking arrangement.
While certainly they've fucked before, they will now do so with a different tax status."

"And if you look here, you can see that
everything you believe in is a crock of shit."

-Your research dollars at work

Look, like I'm all for the expansion of human knowledge, and I'm sure Zuckerman's findings are a major contribution to the field of calling people stupid idiots, but do we have to keep presenting science as a club that beats all the joy out of life? Maybe it's just me but the U of R study (or at least the coverage of it) feels like someone trying to pick a fight. It makes me wonder if using research money to try and explain why religion is wrong isn't not only missing the point, but burning valuable resources in the process.

No one's going to win the science vs. religion debate, so shouldn't we be funding research that actually helps people out and you know, cures stuff, like cancer? How's that coming?

"Well the bad news is, you have terminal exploding face cancer.
The good news is that we've discovered that there's no God, so you can spend
your remaining time contemplating the existential horror of non-existence."