This irks my butt

In the interest of pluralism and tolerance, it is often said by very well-intentioned people that religion and science can and should coexist peacefully. I suppose that it's not necessary for them to clash - at least, science need have no quibble with religion - but it turns out that in practice there are almost inevitable pitfalls. These come in two forms. From the science side, you have folks like Richard Dawkins who feel a need to proselytize against religion. When I was a 20 year old philosophy major who smoked like 72 blunts a day, I felt a similar need (which even then I suppressed since it was in poor taste). But guys like Dawkins just don't get over it. He's been a vocal atheist for years, penned numerous articles and books on the matter, and now gone so far as to buy bus-side advertisements. Seems pathological to me. In the end though I think guys like this are basically harmless. No one to whom religion is important is going to pay him any attention. Has even one person been "converted" by Dawkins' "science"? Doubtful. Mostly he preaches to the choir.

From the other side, we've got something a bit more insidious. Bear with me as I digress for a moment. Organized religions (especially Christianity) have been put in a bit of a bind over the past couple centuries. Despite the fanciful theories of some apologists (my college history of science professor, for one), it's hard to say with a straight face that the church has not been a consistent antagonist of science. Unfortunately for the Holy Father and his associates, science has marched right on, and our view of the world has become increasingly physicalist over the past 500 years. More significantly, that progress of knowledge has underpinned the enormous progress made in the real world over that same time. To the point that the church has been in a state of pretty steady retreat, alternately opposing and then accepting quite a litany of discoveries: the printing press; heliocentrism; the circulation of blood; and of course evolution. The links are mostly referring to the Catholic Church, since that was the most cohesive and the largest Christian institution until the past 200 year. The Protestant faiths have been to varying degrees more (e.g. Southern Baptists) or less (e.g. Unitarians) conservative in this respect. The example of evolution is perhaps the best example of this growing equivocation.

It was perhaps inevitable that the faiths would give this fight up in the end, and begin to co-opt and appropriate the science they once opposed. The examples of this are numerous, but one I saw recently has me particularly heated. The Catholic Church, you see, opposes all forms of birth control. This is as crazy as it sounds. They apparently know this, and know too that many of the faithful ignore it (but probably feel guilty about it anyway, which is really my core complaint about Christianity). I know a number of Catholics, and most of them are or have at one time or another been on birth control. It's the responsible thing to do if you have sex kids. Well anyway, the church (this is true of our evangelicals too) knows this, but also knows that aversion to abortion is quite a bit stronger. So the plan is this. Fake up some official documents saying that chemical contraceptives actually cause abortions, sprinkle in some references to scientific studies (but don't actually cite anything real), and voila! You have thousands of people avoiding a safe and effective contraceptive (Plan B) based on a lie.

Excuse me? What the fuck, wasn't Jesus pretty clear about lying?

I don't mean this to be an anti-religion diatribe. But it is exactly this sort of thing that gets in the way of the sort of peaceful coexistence of believers and non-believers that Obama spoke of at his inauguration. Do atheists do stupid things? Of course, see above. But do they do evil things (like spreading unequivocal lies that make life worse for people who look to them for guidance) in the name of their beliefs? Not that I know of. The Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention still do.