How to Impugn Religious Believers

The headline, "Creationists grow increasingly desperate in feud with Neil deGrasse Tyson," implies much more than it says.

We get it that these "creationists," whoever they are, and whatever their beliefs may be (and I think they probably don't all agree exactly on every detail of belief in the creation of the Earth and humankind), are having some kind of "feud" with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Well, you say, the headline is just to lure us in to reading the whole story, which must be deliciously and delectably full of unpleasant details about these desperate and horrible creationists, who dare to get into a feud with the famous astronomer.

Yeah, that's true. And so the actual article begins:

Creationists want religion out of Cosmos, unless of course it favors them. Each week Neil deGrasse Tyson has been attacked by creationists and the religious right for anything he says that makes religion look bad. In this week’s episode about electricity, Tyson discussed a Christian scientist...

The article goes on to describe the twisted logic of some "Christian fundamentalist" who is outraged, outraged, I say, by the way that Tyson discusses Michael Faraday's religious beliefs.

Not to disparage the Christian fundamentalist who complained about the "Cosmos" treatment of Faraday, nor Alternet writer Dan Arel, but, I've got to say this much:

Please, could everybody just shut up and think about what science entails, and what religion entails: both of them are about discovering truth. Aren't they? And has the truth ever, ever, ever, in the history of our dear Earth, been reached by this kind of verbal attack and counter-attack? No, it has not. What has been reached is a ramping-up of hostilities that has led to unhappiness, discord, and wars. 

Those supposedly religious creationists who "want religion out of Cosmos" and those supposedly scientific rationalists who also want religionists out of everything should all get themselves out of this conversation.

And scientists, or those people who have anointed themselves as a new generation of Darwin's bulldogs, or Tyson's Rottweilers, or whatever they think they are and whatever good they think they're doing, should just knock it off. Don't they realize that by writing these kinds of articles they draw themselves into the debate and look just as foolish and vulnerable as the people they're criticizing.

This kind of argument is a lose-lose for everyone involved.  But here's what's going to happen: These high priests of the new gods of science, in their attempts to hold their sway over the beliefs of the common people, making them sit in the corner losing their religion, are going to be defrocked. Not by the people who write that stupid anti-science stuff in order to hang on by the skin of their teeth to their "creationist" views, but by the common people who refuse to sit in that corner, refuse to lose their religion, and refuse to buy into false dogma from either side.