snopes

In my opinion no. Being rational and skeptical is a great thing. Rational Wiki is an even better place than snopes, I tend to use snopes to disprove those chain letters and other blatantly nonfactual crap wherever it appears. As an Atheist I think it's great you are questioning things, whether that leads you away from religion or not. Some people can reconcile both, and still wind up as biochemists. So you won't go wrong with a skeptical approach to life and all the wild claims you will run into.

 

Nope. In fact, go for it and listen to lectures on YouTube and read about secular ethics and discuss stuff with atheists and so on. If a religion is the truth, it'll stand up to poking. If a religion isn't the truth, you need to find that out and push away the religion. Whatever conclusions you arrive at, make sure they're based on logic and reason, and Snopes is great for disproving some religious claims.

 

The great religions were never about abandoning reason, they have always had reason as an ally (when they were properly understood). The great danger of religion is that, without the discipline of reason, they very easily degenerate into mindless dogma or strange and inappropriate interpretations.

From my Judaic perspective, it seems to be one of the more reasonable religions, all one needs to do is to open up a tractate of the Talmud to see the struggles that scholars have wrestled with to interpret the law as best they could. The situational ethics are among the most brilliant insights they have come up wth, and much of our civil law is based on these principles.

It is very easy to make fun of religious practices from an outsider's perspective, the foundational principles are seldom apparent, but the baby to bathwater ratio is quite large, one must be very discriminating as to what to reject and what to keep.

I've heard it said that faith begins where reason ends...otherwise it wouldn't be called "faith"...