My question should really be this: is Richard Dawkins' staunch promotion of evolution = atheism defeating the cause to promote scientific literacy in the United States and other countries that reject evolutionary theory?

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Darwin's birth. What better time to instigate the debate.

Science is the body of knowledge reflecting our understanding of the world, gained through using the scientific method.

Religion claims to understand our world in a way that I can only leave up to other posters here to explain. I'm not qualified.

Which does a better job at 'understanding'. Will science replace religion as the best approach to getting closer to 'truths'?

I'd like to communicate further that it is not just the claims of religion which I do not accept, but all supernatural claims.  Richard Dawkins has made a two-part film called "The Enemies of Reason" which can be viewed on-line.  Here's part one:

http://video.google.ca/videosearch?q=the+enemies+of+reason&hl=en&emb=0&aq=0&oq=the+enemies#

(Part two should be listed there somewhere).

The straight question: was Jesus the son of God in terms of Science? Straight answer: No, in my opinion.

In Biblical times the word virgin had nothing to do with sex. At that time virgin meant not married.

Jesus was not the genetic son of God. However Jesus was right to say that he was the son of God. We are all the children of God, just as any adopted child is the son or daughter of their adopted parents.

     As a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, I had the opportunity to serve for four years in Colorado.  As I tell anybody who listens, before going to Colorado, I was pretty well an atheist.  However, after four years living with American Christians, I came back to Canada an angry atheist.  In the course of my life, the most offensive people I have ever met were American Christians. Their culture is bigoted, myopic, and hypocritical.

I notice the tendency for people (both Christain and secular) to discuss God and science as though the two are mutually exclusive. Science, which is a product of flawed human intelligence (flawed in the sense that no human has ever been shown to be infallible), is quoted time and time again as being able to prove the non-existence of God, or at least the non-existence of the God as set out in the Biblical record.

In many other threads (especially in the Theory of Evolution vs. Creationism threads) there has been a lot of misunderstanding and simply false information about the nature of "The Scientific Method" and the meaning of the word "Theory" and what is meant by Peer Review, so rather than clutter up these other threads, I have opened this one to try and clarify the confusion. I have tried to put it into ordinary language, so please don't get overly hung up about the simplifications I have made.