Dave Masterson, you appear to have arrived at Mudcat on the Kansas Express, eh?

We are all human beings and should give respect to others, whether we receive it back or not. To dismiss those with different views to oneself in the terms used in this thread is the first step on a similar journey that ended in the gas chambers of World War 2.

That's rich. Construct a straw man and see if you can get people arguing about WWII gas chambers instead of the sleight of hand going on in Kansas and elsewhere when "Intelligent Design" is pushed down science teachers' throats. Christian fundamentalists want to dismiss hard science and replace it with THEIR religious beliefs. In this shell game, they are placing christian religion above the religious beliefs of others, but hope no one will notice because they all have their eyes on the shell that science is under. From this position I see that they ultimately hope for christian converts in the classroom, the demotion/demonization of other religions, and the control of science direction and funding.

Your opinion that science is a "religious belief" is based upon your overheated exposure to over-zealous christianity. The attempt to pull Science onto religious turf is brought about by the frequent christian quoting of pseudo-scientific skeptics who claim to be in the sciences. This rejection of religion in the classroom was NEVER about the exclusion of religion in the life of scientific people or anyone else, and some of the best scientists of our day have been highly religious (i.e., Einstein, but wait--he's Jewish, and that's one of the things the "Intelligent Design" folks want to set aside, the viewpoints of other religions.)

There are a lot of philosphical links between science and religion, but they're not the ones you're suggesting.

SRS