Wasting Effort on Utterly Stupid Argument Amongst Ourselves

I'll be brief about the set up here.

Daniel Loxton wrote a book about evolution.  It is a good book, it's aimed at kids.

In it he made a very brief (and in such fashion necessarily simplified) comment on the relationship between science and religion. “Science as a whole has nothing to say about religion.”

For the most part no one made a peep about it until it got Pharyngulated.

Now every Dawkins-styled militant atheist with a knee-jerk desire to burn a book has something to say about it.

This is bullshit.

Seriously guys?  You'd tear that page out of the book?  He's a liar?

Get a fucking grip.

We are ALL ON THE SAME SIDE HERE.

Yes, that sentence is a huge simplification of an arguable point about a single perspective of an aspect in the relationship between reason and religion.  The book is for kids!  It's about evolution.  Whether you personally like it or not there is a direct and critical connection between evolution education and religious belief - one so obvious that Darwin himself figured out it was going to be an issue.
If Daniel had left out ANY comment on religion he would have been criticized for that.  He had to say something.  If someone wants to try to takle a book on theism for kids and try to wade through the task of translating Kierkegaard and Aquinas for nine year olds, then go for it.  But Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be is, emphatically, not that book.

Educating kids in evolutionary basics is far more important than any imagined damage that that, frankly totally inoccuous, sentence could manage.  Let. It. Go.

Let it go because it's not worth the fight.

Let it go because you didn't even notice until you read about it elsewhere.

Let it go because if you step back and look at the argument with a little perspective it amounts to: "Hey you atheist! When you were talking about atheism you said something that wasn't atheistic enough to satisfy my atheistic views."

Let it go because when taken from a limited perspective, Daniel is not wrong.  (See his comments on meta-physics.  Also note that in a recent post on what is out of bounds I say things that can easily be interpreted as disagreeing with Daniel's premise.  I still stand by him.  That's how asinine the core of this debate is.)

Let it go because we ALL have better things to do - more important issues to tackle.

Let it go because the point, as far as it matters, has been made.

Let it go because we are wasting tame and effort arguing amongst ourselves and that is just fucking stupid.

I mean seriously.  CAM advocates can band together and promote mutually exclusive bullshit therapies together with one another - even make up entirely new disciplines based upon two pieces of garbage that can't logically share the same intellectual space.  So why can't we agree to disagree on this?  It would have been nice if we could have agree to disagree quielty, but it's far too late for that.

I am in favour of militant atheism.  I haven't the energy to excercise it all the time, but I think we do need to exert our position as strongly as any believer of a religion might.  But when we bear that upon our allies and ourselves we are using precious resources of time and wit to divide our own ranks.  Yet we seem to think that we are the enightened ones.