the Mormon church would have disbanded long ago after definitive evidence showed that the Book of Mormon is fiction,and then everybody would have gone on to something else.
Except for the couple handfulls of people who still held onto some crazy conspiracy theory that allows for the BoM to still be true. The group would create a web ring of about 15 sites, and they would push out a YouTube video around every full moon.
If religion was like science, new information that threatens established dogmas would be vigorously denied by vested interests. People would buy into whatever groupthink they are taught and go along with the status quo to avoid damage to their careers or friendships.
haha just what I was thinking. If anyone wants a good overview on the historical theatrics of science, read Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" I never realized how much like religion science can be...
There's science, but there are also ideologies and agendae which are advanced, and garnished with bits of science and data. I'm not talking about silly fictions like "Christian Science." The advocates of global warming first were opposed by scattered skeptics, and were derisively dismissed as uninformed irrational "deniers." But more of the Warming advocates' data and methodology has been cross-checked, and is being shown as flawed, at the least, or fraudulent, at the very worst. But they still claim the moral high ground.
I realize this may be very contentious, and I apologize if the thread veers off into parts unknown. My point is that whereas we would like to think of science as objective and impartial. And in is pure form, it is. But it can be incestuously coupled with ideological, social, political, corporate, and religious/irreligious/antireligious agendae.