I may stray off the science reservation occasionally. I think any ideology can function psychologically as a religion. That includes political ideologies, mysticism, pseudoscience — whatever.
Science is indeed an enterprise made up up human individuals, and any large list of people there will be some who are quacks, some who are criminal, some who are nuts, some who dabble in areas for which they have no expertise. This also applies to religion, and the list of people professing faith in a creator God.
So my request is simply to remove comments from science threads that are not relevant to the objectives and methodologies employed by science. It would still be possible to have lively debates — just not flame wars in which the argument devolves into attacks on the morality of the participants.
my request is simply to remove comments from science threads
***And my request is to have such comments preserved, as long as they are allowed. People want to discuss this stuff, so let them. There appears to be enough interest from both sides to have serious science-only discussion on one thread, and science/philosopy/religious implications discussion on the other, so we could use this caucus/ecumenical tag system as the template to move forward with that kind of system.
I think any ideology can function psychologically as a religion. That includes political ideologies, mysticism, pseudoscience — whatever.
***I agree. You also point out earlier that “It’s something of a relief to hear that the official position of FR is that science is not a religion.” These two thoughts seem to be opposed. Why would you find it such a relief if you also know that such “idealogies can function as a religion”?
Agreed, but sometimes the process that's being used to proclaim something a "religion" starts to look an awful lot like the process Congress uses to determine what's "interstate commerce".
So my request is simply to remove comments from science threads that are not relevant to the objectives and methodologies employed by science.
***I see the religion moderator is quiet, possibly due to internal discussions with other moderators as to how to handle this thing. The fact that the atheism tag has been used successfully on an ecumenical thread is instructive. And it’s also instructive that the mod claims there’s no interest, and that it appears the impetus would come from the moderator as to whether he/she would even WANT to try to moderate such discussion (most likely NOT). So if you want to see flame-free discussions on scientific subjects, the impetus is likely to come from someone like you. When you post an article, you will likely get cooperation from the mods if you post it under the religion forum using a “scientism” tag or whatnot. Of course, it also means that whoever chooses to open discussion under such a tag has implicitly/explicitly agreed that scientism is a religion. Until then, it appears we’re all stuck with the existing system.