Well, speaking of “educating our citizens” and conquering “global warming” in the same sentence, is it not curious that current global temperatures match the 1980s global average?

Facts, as John Adams famously said, are stubborn things.

It is ironic that you quote from a great believer in democratic government, Frederick Douglass, since the online behavior I have read from many of your compatriots is one that I would recognize in the zealous acts of the Red Guards during the People Republic China’s infamous, nearly decade-long Cultural Revolution.

In the Intersection blog on survey data on science and religion, John Kotcher has brought to our attention the writings of eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who, writing over at the Huffington Post, has observed that atheism is a ‘stealth religion”. His assessment may be correct, especially in light of the abysmal online conduct I have seen from your fellow militant atheists here and elsewhere:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/#blogger_bio

1 : engaged in warfare or combat : fighting
2 : aggressively active (as in a cause) : combative

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
-Frederick Douglass

On the contrary, I disagree. I think they are being intellectually honest with themselves as I have noted. Indeed, since you raised that observation, then let me ask whether you and your fellow militants are being intellectually honest with yourselves in believing that you can persuade religiously devout Americans into rejecting their religious values, recognize evolution as valid science, and embrace the New Atheist agenda espoused by the likes of Coyne, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Myers? At least one of your more prominent leaders, Lawrence Krauss, is enough of a realist to realize that this won’t happen any time soon.

If you want to use me as an example, you could ask how I, a registered Republican, could accept evolution as valid science (Incidentally there are quite a few Republicans who do.). Human beings are by the very nature, inconsistent, and yet they can still be intellectually honest with themselves and others.), without realizing that I could do this, in part, because I was trained as an evolutionary biologist, and because, more importantly, my very conscience would expect no less from myself.

I think you missed the part about having to be intellectually honest with themselves. I don’t deny that there have been brilliant scientific minds who believed in god. That is indeed undeniable. What I’m arguing is that their reasons for doing so are neither rational nor scientific and that simply saying, well, that’s just my faith is a cop-out to avoid addressing the inherent inconsistency in their standards of evidence. While absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence, and what can be asserted without evidence can just as easily be rejected without evidence.

No, absolutely not. All the people I cited (with perhaps the possible exception of Simon Conway Morris) place their strict adherence to science and the scientific method “light years” ahead of their religious considerations. Ayala, Rosenzweig and Wilson are all definitely scientists of the first rank, who have probably made more important – and more lasting – contributions in evolutionary biology than either Coyne or Dawkins. And then of course, there’s Dobzhansky, whom I would place after Ernst Mayr and Sir Ronald A. Fisher as among our most important 20th Century evolutionary biologists.

Your “comparison” is not merely risible, but it is actually quite pregnant in its breathtaking inanity.

By the standard you are using the practice of medicine and homeopathy are compatible.