Perhaps one day PZM and others will understand the difference between appeasement and Realpolitik. I’m not holding my breath.

In fact, I agree with a point that Consi made repeatedly on a few occasions. If you want to win this war – keeping creationism out of public schools – you need to win over whoever is undecided, make a play for the opposition’s moderates, and take a stand against opposition’s core constituency. Pissing on everybody who does not unreservedly agree with you is definitely not the way to go.

Seen through the lens of evolutionary principles, exactly how is an all-out attack against religiosity supposed to work? If we ever get people to ditch irrational religious beliefs, we have to marginalize the religious meme in the meme pool…

LOL! well said.  Here is Brayton’s post about the whole thing.

I’d love to know what PZ thinks is the good of attacking people who agree with him but are too reasonable for his tastes?  Or for that matter of attacking people who disagree with him in principle but value secular education and believe their religion belongs in church?

Personally, I’m willing to go so far and say that theistic beliefs and acceptance of the scientific method can only be reconciled by a strict and somewhat irrational compartmentalization. However, there is no reason that I could see why a theist can’t be a damn good scientist.

Creationism vs. evolution and theism vs. atheism are indeed two different battles. They are obviously related, although many creationists are intellectually dishonest enough to refuse to acknowledge that transparent fact.

The way I see it, religion is a both a tool and a weapon. It can be wielded by believers and unbelievers alike. The real enemy is our tribal nature – evolution tunes us to a world that is long gone and from the perspective of our genes, we may as well live on an alien planet. We are functional, but poorly adapted.

Where I disagree with Dawkins, Harris, and others is that their attacks against religious beliefs miss a profound connection. Seen through the lens of evolutionary principles, exactly how is an all-out attack against religiosity supposed to work? If we ever get people to ditch irrational religious beliefs, we have to marginalize the religious meme in the meme pool…

I am definitely an atheist but I much prefer people like you, and like the crew at Debunking Christianity, who are uniformly polite, give believers their say, do not assume all Christians are fundamentalist nut-jobs, and who know enough theology to destroy the arguments of theists.  (I may be unfair to PZ in saying this, but sometimes it appears that ‘the only thing he knows about Christianity is that he’s agin’ it.”)

I make no secret out of my disdain for religious belief and my hostility against organized religion. At the same time, I see no need to extrapolate from my opposition to religious belief to the group of religious believers. It has never mattered to me what anybody actually believes in – most people could articulate or communicate this in any case. What matters to me is what people do with their beliefs, real or purported.

By the way, I absolutely, positively loathe atheist forums – as opposed to something like SEB, which happens to be an atheist’s blog, a small, but subtle distinction. The lack of god belief in and by itself does not imply a sufficient commonality of interests…

As to pharyngula, I’ve long given up on the comments. I can adjust for PZM’s bias, but that’s about it.