I dig Jesus?

I'd like to continue this religion discussion, started by phishbone23, and I figured I'd make a full post of it, rather than leave a huge comment on our other thread.

Out of curiosity, when's the last time all you readers went to church? Funerals and weddings don't count. Fish, you didn't go regularly as a kid, did you? I know DrX and I didn't. Maybe the lack of God in our formative years actually caused us to look for real answers to our questions, leading us to careers in science. Now, going to church as an adult is a rather dull experience. It's been about two years since I went last (I went because of a girl, of course!) and in all that time, I never once felt I was missing out by spending my Sunday mornings sleeping in and getting ready for football.

Ask most any God-fearing person what the world would be like without religion and they would describe a society without morals and discipline. We would all be free to do whatever we want all the time, without worry of punishment in the afterlife. There would be chaos as people try to grasp a life without an ultimate meaning.

I believe that if religion finally died out we'd have a society full of science nerds. People would no longer be able to retreat to the trustworthy "Because God did it" explanation to answer their tough questions, they would actually have to search for the real answers. Inquisitiveness would be encouraged from the youth. There would be no more dead end answer to questions that you don't know the answer to. People could actually admit that they don't know, and then try to find out. People would turn to the physicists, biologists and chemists to answer their questions rather than to their religious leaders. I think this is the biggest misunderstanding that religious folks have of atheists. They accuse us of believing in nothing and being close minded, when all we are doing is looking for the real answers to the world around us. The existence of God is a seemingly unnecessary hypothesis that has no evidence to support it. Give us evidence and we'll believe, we say, but in all the years of humanity, that evidence has never come. The silence speaks volumes.

Now, I know that I most definitely don't speak for all nonbelievers. Let them tell you why they are what they are. Most are much more militant in their atheism than I. After all, I would go back to church in a minute if it got me closer to a beautiful woman, but all the churchin' in the world couldn't make me believe. Talk is cheap, give me some hard evidence if you want to convert me.