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However, I see the religious card being used less as a tool to promote community and more as an excuse to hide behind bigotry and ignorance. Unfortunately, science cannot be applied to human morality.
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unfortunately, as a history of science buff and my major being in physical anthropology (fuck me, if that wasn't a primarily racist backdrop for the beginning of a science, I don't know what one is!) many people do use science attempt to back of some really hideous sh*t. Don't get me wrong, please. I *love* science and I love the history of science and I love philosophy of science. I was also brought up in a household of two researcher parents. Science is not faultless or pure in this regard. As mush as I love it, it's been used pretty destructively. I know it's the individuals that corrupt it, but that's really no different imo than corruption in any other field. People, all people, even scientists, can be fucked up bastards with no concept of the implications of what they are doing or it's repercussions at the very least of the baddie scale, and at the top end of the baddie scale, they can be unfathomable bigots of every rainbow flavour and use what they are doing to try and make a reason why X people do X and M people do M.
Sociobiology and eugenics are extremely slipperly slopes, for example. And I really *really* am wary about people looking for "genes" of behaviour. The implications being we cannot help who we are and cannot change. I know the gay thing slides into that, however my argument is the gay gene should be fucking moot. If gay was *truly* ok, it wouldn't matter that you had a genetic "excuse." And I personally won't use it to back up my argument for the vary reason that you can then use the gene excuse for xenophobia and all other types of human behaviours that frankly
should be examined and overcome.
So while I honour and have a sense of beauty and purpose in science, I'm very aware of people being people with it. It's not different than any other human endeavour.