1. VOICES OF SCIENCE: PZ Myers - Buy it now on DVD

Comment #216943 by razajac on July 23, 2008 at 5:40 pm

PZ and Richard early on hit on the issue of vociferous advocacy. One of the things people don't talk about enough about the practice of religion--esp. fundamentalist Christianity, as I've seen it--is how this dynamic functions in these milieus.

In churches that seem stable and getting on swimmingly, what you can find pretty quickly is a kind of mutually agreeable standoff. People believe all kinds of weird stuff in these situations, and are generally adapted to keeping these things to themselves. By way of further stabilization, however, when someone who's forgotten the content of this particular memo pipes up and says something off-the-wall, there's a general understanding to smile and nod and pretend to be in agreement. The reason I know there's not is that I've occasionally been in these situations and, not being beholden to this state of affairs, try to get to the bottom of things, whereupon it becomes quickly apparent that "getting to the bottom of things" is NOT the order of the day, or of any day, in these environments.

I felt this is something Richard and PZ were sort of hinting at when they raised this issue regarding the scientific community.