I admit that on days when I'm not feeling inspired, I tend to turn this place into a metablog of Pharyngula or Dispatches from the Culture Wars. This is especially true when I start entering jibber-jabber at the end of a 100-comment string, only to realize that not only am I likely to be duplicating a number of existing comments, but am going on at sufficient length to merit a token bleat here.

PZ discussed a public talk he gave that led him to consider in detail one of the greatest hindrances to tipping creationists in the direction of at least giving the facts a fair shake, if not credence: arrogance.

Consider the word at face value. There is nothing more purely arrogant than claiming something is true while admitting that there is not only no evidence for it, but that none can even be conceived. God wouldn't be what its noisiest fans say it is if it could be detected. Even if God somehow turned out to be exactly what Christians think and that we can verify this, it would make their stance of today no less arrogant.

The rabble often confuses arrogance with something else, such as a lack of tact, a failure to be appropriately humble, or garden-variety assholism/jackholism. The word has connotations of bearing, but these are secondary, particularly in the context of philosophical matters. People perceive "arrogance" in the athlete who's talented and isn't ashamed to admit it, or in the drop-dead beauty who doesn't mask the fact that she's proud of being able to snag the man of her choice on the simple basis of her appearance. Sadly, they also smear people like PZ with the "arrogance" label for having the temerity to put to use his years of education and scholarship in exploding the stupid arguments of fundagelical Christians.

They do this primarily to score points within their own ranks -- it's always handy to be able to paint your opponent as "soulless" or "having no greater purpose" or some other horseshit that has no inherent meaning -- but they also believe it, because their belief system instructs them to mistrust facts that contradict the Bible. Within any such system, scientists would be "arrogant" by defintion, since they're making truth claims about things that contravene Bible "teachings" and generally going on at some length about it.

Folks, here's the deal. Imagine some wide-eyed, naive, timid young mother of two standing up in a room full of people an announcing (probably to thunderous cheers) that she doesn't believe in evolution because she "knows in her heart" that the Bible is true. Now picture a seedy-looking, shitfaced chimera of Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens taking the dais afterward and yelling in a strident voice that she's an ignorant rube, then going on to explain, in clear but vulgar language and perhaps farting as he goes, the basic facts of how modern biology and cosmology render creationism scientifically vacuous.

Is he boozy critic impolitic? Yes. Unlikely to be invited back to Glum Pecker Ridge, Mississippi? Yes. But it is the little lamb before him who is supremely arrogant.

This kind of thing is unique to religion, at least to the extent that criticism is regarded as disrespect or even intolerance and knowledge is not only given no weight but treated as bona fide liability. People in other realms have no problem with others rooting out and decrying idiocy and f*ckistry for what it is, especially when the nonsense-purveyor is trying to turn a buck.

As someone who has run marathons for 15 years, studied graduate-level physiology, "experimented" on myself and others, read as much as possible about the discipline, and treated the whole endeavor as a mixed bag of empiricism, soul-searching and childlike joy, I feel eminently more qualified to hand out advice about training to run 26.2 miles than some "coach" who has never run farther than 8 miles but recently "learned" in a dream that the secret to running well is to wear yellow knee socks, drink exactly the right shade of blue Gatorade, never run further than ten miles on Tuesdays, wear magnetic bracelets around your ankles, and be able to bench press one and a half times your own weight. If I'm not shy about saying so, few would take issue with my verbiage, yet you can guarantee that the thoroughly debunked shitslinger will himself resort immediately to the "you're-a-know-it-all" line in an effort to rally sympathy.

I've learned that the trick in such situations is to give an extreme example of why steering the discussion toward matters of rhetorical style is useless. I explain that someone wearing a Peter Gibbons-esque cheerful smile and having nothing but kind words for anyone will always be wrong if he says 2 + 2 = 5, and that if I call him a douchebag on wheels and use terms like "donkey punch" in the course of correcting him (thereby mimicking a post about the Discovery Institute's affably inane Casey Luskin by any number of irritated interlocutors), it doesn't change who is right; it just changes the input into the popularity contest. This doesn't mean it's a good idea to be an asshole on purpose when you have other means, but it does help convince on-the-fence observers that the trick employed by bunk-sprayers of linking style to content has no legitimacy.

It's often struck me that religious belief is so arrantly f*cked up that its adherents aren't content to merely be wrong; they have to get things 100 percent backward most of the time as well. In fact, the whole house of cards seems to rely on this, especially in an increasingly skeptical world.