All the benefits of religion (socialization, self reflection, placebo effects) can also be found outside of religion, and without the needless risk of building your worldview on unfounded claims.
I think you are underestimating how much needless death and suffering has resulted from people pretending that false things are true. There are more victims every day.
I don’t think you understand your argument is sloppy, you are extrapolating from the “fact” that in your perception that all said and done religion has done far more damage to science than good in terms of their relationship.
Crucially I am not debating whether that “fact” is true or not, I am pointing out that only expresses the result of their political intersections and the ways they have been exploited towards entirely earthly ends, you have not actually explained any incompatible mechanism between science and religion, and more damning for your argument you have no way to identify what makes the times religion has had a mutually beneficial relationship with science (sometimes by inhabiting the same famous scientist) anamalous and not immediately destructive?
If you are saying science and religion are like oil and water, I am saying that stating that most of the time oil and water don’t mix well doesn’t prove that they cannot mix at a general level, and it does not express a mechanism that makes these two things naturally opposed.
Powered by US money and far-right European think tanks, Cambridge has recently become an outpost of a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity, through the figure of James Orr – Head of Policy at Reform UK described as Nigel Farage’s “Kingmaker“.
Oh, just willful ignorance replacing science, cult indoctrination replacing education. Do you think that is coincidence?
The sprawling complex regularly houses at any one time half a dozen or so postgraduate students from the University of Cambridge.
According to James Orr, the property is more than just a home, but a political and religious centre: a “right-wing Mecca” and a “Conservative Kibbutz”.
A regular resident, Rod Dreher, author of the 2017 book The Benedict Option, likens the place to “a Christian Asturias”, after the medieval Iberian kingdom that launched the Catholic Reconquista against Muslim rule. He has said it “needs to happen in as many places as it can”.
It is a cancer that seeks to spread.
Recent guests and visitors read like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of political pilgrims and scholars – almost exclusively from the right.
Peter Thiel has visited; as has his protegee, Donald Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, who described Orr as his “British Sherpa“.
Savory characters, huh?
Orr’s Cambridge University position, he said, was central to this. He had met “hundreds” of Cambridge students he considered suitable allies, and his job at Reform was to work out how those students could be “recruited into the party at scale”.
What are all those students learning?
Subjects such as Palestine and human rights are frowned upon; and authors on the reading list include Orr’s former colleague at Oxford University, Nigel Biggar – a Conservative peer who has sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the British Empire against the consensus among academic historians.
But you want to pretend religion is tolerable in the information age. You want to pretend religion and science are compatible.
Jordan Peterson finished his 2024 book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, at the Orrs’ Cambridge base. He endorsed The Bell Curve in an interview with Douglas Murray, whom sources describe as another close friend of the Orrs and a regular guest at their compound.
One Cambridge student familiar with multiple humanities departments outside the Faculty of Divinity described a “normalisation of disparaging views of ethnic minorities” among some Cambridge academics.
You defended this racism whether you meant to or not. That is the harm of magical thinking.
Isaac Riley is a postgraduate student in Old Testament theology at the Faculty of Divinity who currently lives with the Orrs. He writes for The European Conservative – a Budapest-based far-right magazine previously funded by Orbán’s Government through a state-linked foundation. In November 2024, he published a “moral argument against migration”, contending that a government’s “primary obligation is to the native”. A second essay cast transgender identity as theologically “heinous”.
Do not make the mistake of tolerating this bigotry.
In January this year, as part of a US and European tour, Thiel delivered four private, invite-only ‘Antichrist Lectures’ in the Ramsden Room of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge University – again hosted by Orr. Previous leaks from these lectures suggest that his version of the ‘Antichrist’ ranges from the climate activist Greta Thunberg to any regulation of AI.
I also said:
I think you are underestimating how much needless death and suffering has resulted from people pretending that false things are true. There are more victims every day.
I don’t think you understand your argument is sloppy, you are extrapolating from the “fact” that in your perception that all said and done religion has done far more damage to science than good in terms of their relationship.
Crucially I am not debating whether that “fact” is true or not, I am pointing out that only expresses the result of their political intersections and the ways they have been exploited towards entirely earthly ends, you have not actually explained any incompatible mechanism between science and religion, and more damning for your argument you have no way to identify what makes the times religion has had a mutually beneficial relationship with science (sometimes by inhabiting the same famous scientist) anamalous and not immediately destructive?
If you are saying science and religion are like oil and water, I am saying that stating that most of the time oil and water don’t mix well doesn’t prove that they cannot mix at a general level, and it does not express a mechanism that makes these two things naturally opposed.
Say, what’s going on at Cambridge University?
https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/peter-thiel-and-reform-uks-cambridge-university-pipeline-project/
Oh, just willful ignorance replacing science, cult indoctrination replacing education. Do you think that is coincidence?
It is a cancer that seeks to spread.
Savory characters, huh?
What are all those students learning?
But you want to pretend religion is tolerable in the information age. You want to pretend religion and science are compatible.
You defended this racism whether you meant to or not. That is the harm of magical thinking.
Do not make the mistake of tolerating this bigotry.
Religion is killing us. It’s time to do better.