Reply #3: Heh heh... [View All]

[beam me up scottie]

I love PZ:

As the Blackburn paper illustrates in its opening anecdote, though, showing a lack of respect for religion in the sense above is one of those things that drives the acutely religious nuts. It is not enough to let them be, you must also acknowledge the vast and weighty import of their history, their rituals, their majestic all-powerful Tooth Fairy. And since their god is infinitely malleable, they can attach him to anything to add his incalculable mass to whatever end they want. Little kids get told to say their prayers before bedtime—a meaningless ritual backed by the Lord of the Entire Universe. People are killed en masse in wars because they address same Lord by a different name or title than other people.

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We just go along with it all, accepting religious mythology as an implicit part of our culture, and now we're at the point where Wolf Blitzer can ask in all seriousness "if the recent natural disasters…were indication of END OF DAYS" on a major news network, and damn few question the insanity of the question. We can have a president nominate someone to the Supreme Court, and the apologists point to the fervency of her belief in Jesus as one of her qualifications.

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Why is uncritical devotion to the unseen and unevidenced considered a benefit for a secular position that requires scholarly analysis of evidence and history? (OK, I know the newest qualifications are for a fanatical adherence to an ideology in spite of the evidence, and in that case religiosity may indicate a predisposition to that…but I'm an idealist and would like to imagine that many people oppose such corruption of the court.)