This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.
There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science. This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.
Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion. On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology. It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.
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