"The Catholic church as an organization has done some pretty horrific things. "

the catholic church did not create nuclear weapons... the scientific community did... and they are the greatest threat to mankind and i'd argue that they should never have been created

actually when it comes down to it - uranium depleted rounds, biological weapons, hollow points, pipe bombs, napalm etc etc etc who developed these threats to humanity? the church or the scientific community?

i don't follow... so what exactly are the jews doing from your perspective?

But the scientific community "as an organization" did not do these things. There was no mandate from on high that all scientists must adhere to and make weapons. There are just scientists that do. Not the same things as the catholic church as an organization shuttling around pedophiles and keeping them from justice or making the AIDS crisis worse by telling people in Africa they can't use condoms. 

Maybe they should stop raping kids? Surely hollywood will stop making fun of them then.

The whole pedophile thing with the Catholic church was like 10 years ago.

Hollywood right now is having an ongoing rape and abuse problem. They are hardly the ones that should be preaching.

i didn't say that the scientific community is an entity with one purpose but the point is that the consequences of the scientific method have been negative as well as positive ( and some people would argue that it has been mostly negative)

you can't separate the negative consequences of science from the positive and act as if its only positive... the same way that people in this threat are saying that you can't take away the negative aspects away from religion

i could make the argument that religion generally has a positive goal but bad practitioners distort that goal just like in the scientific community

Those weapons have been created, but have barely been used. The atomic bomb, ironically, could in large part be responsible for why we did NOT have a direct war between any major powers in the last 70 years, even if the two largest powers hated each other with passion.

Wars were no less cruel, brutal before just because people used sticks and stones to murder each other.

When it comes down to it - who has reduced worldwide child mortality from 50 to 2 percent? Who’s made parasitical disease a thing of the past, turned the flue from a deadly disease to an annoying couple weeks in bed? Who has made food production so efficient that the *quantity* of food produced will never again be a problem? The church or the scientific community?

...okay?

I didn't come here to stack up the crimes of science against the crimes of the church, but let me explain why these are different.

There is no universal, top-down organizational structure in science that is comparable to the Catholic church, or any other similar organization. And that is ultimately what I have a problem with, certain organizational structures.

In many churches though, you have ordinarily decent people who will look the other way on crimes against children, because protecting the integrity of the church is seen as more important. Or you'll have ordinarily decent people treat blacks as second class citizens, or fight against equal rights. All until the guy at the top says it's okay to stop.

And it's not just churches, of course. You can have ordinarily good people conspire to hide information about how unsafe a sport is to protect the integrity and profitability of the sports league. Or, much like the Catholic Church, you can have good people look the other way on decades of sexual abuse to protect a college football program. You can have good, educated, college kids riot and turn over news vans rather than confronting the uncomfortable truth that their idol enabled child abuse. 

There is probably a discussion to be had about specific scientific projects; The Manhattan Project, for example. What compelled otherwise good people, to create a weapon of mass destruction? If they were fundamentally convinced that it was the right thing to do, as I think an argument can be made for, I don't have much of an issue. If they did it out of a sense of duty to their country, or simply because their boss told them too, that might be something to look into.

I am no more against people having a relationship with god than I am against people studying science. But organizations can be corrupted. And fealty to organizations can make people do horrible things. As we've seen above, it can happen in any organization, but it is particularly pernicious in certain churches. And for obvious reasons. God is everything, and the Church has a monopoly on God. 

Well in my country(Caribbean region) there have been cases of kids being raped by priests from time to time, and these are only the ones that make it ot the spotlight. So it hasn't stopped, any parent that that leaves his kid alone with a priest, pastor, reverent, rabbi  or iman should be dammed.

they are not the only weapons created by the scientific community for the lone purpose of killing though, millions die every year as a result of smaller scale weapons

"When it comes down to it - who has reduced worldwide child mortality from 50 to 2 percent? Who’s made parasitical disease a thing of the past, turned the flue from a deadly disease to an annoying couple weeks in bed? Who has made food production so efficient that the *quantity* of food produced will never again be a problem? The church or the scientific community?"

the scientific community... but if we wind up killing a whole bunch of other people through other means... can we concede that there are negative and positive aspects to it?

"Wars were no less cruel, brutal before just because people used sticks and stones to murder each other."

true but the consequences were less far reaching obviously... you can't compare a bomb leveling a whole area to someone throwing a stone