Moonchild wrote
Why is religion reduced to filling in the gaps?
Why does everything that cannot be explained through science (yet) have to be an act of god? It's just a way of coping with the fact that we as human beings know extremely little about the world, while we would like to pretend we know allot about the world, by explaining it as an act of supernatural powers. That's just dumb.
And even if that is the whole of its purpose, I believe the consensus is that we can never know what there was "before" the big bang life.
Not yet. If you tried to explain quantum physics three hundred years ago, your ass would belong to the inquisition. You still might get killed for it in some parts of the world.
So why not address the issue of pain and suffering while we are discussing religion. If there is a god, I feel pretty duped and think he's not really putting that much of an effort in it as supreme being. For what it's worth everybody here that feels duped by god, you can sign the following petition and maybe he'll get the message
www.petitiononline.com/squidgle/petition-sign.html