Tech writer Andrew Leonard writes in Salon about religious outrage against science.
Watch out, “Cosmos”! The Holy Inquisition is not happy with you
The best part: “Cosmos” is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing. I mean, I understand why religious zealots might think it’s cool to slander a science documentary in language suggesting it’s all a Communist plot. (The Big Bang — brought to you by Stalin and the good ole boys at the KGB.) But if there is one thing that the United States sorely needs right now, it’s more effective propaganda in support of facts and the scientific method.
And, of course, it is no accident that Giordano Bruno appeared in the first episode of “Cosmos.” Because whether or not Bruno himself was a scientist, there’s not a whole lot, besides their relative lack of access to killer barbeque tools, that differentiates the current crop of intelligent design advocates and Texas textbook revisionists and inheritors of the Moral Majority mantle from the shame and terror of the Holy Inquisition.
