There may be people who treat science as religion, who have 'faith' in gravity and electromagnetism.

I don't, personally, have any experience of these congregations of people who have blind faith in science and scientists. Where do they meet? Do they organize to influence public policy? Are they given special tax and legal status? Do Obama and McCain both have to pretend they're followers to gain votes?

If such people exist ... they aren't scientists. Science is simply a method of evaluating claims. Scientists don't have blind faith in gravity, say, they have measurements and equations that allow them to model the physical world.

As Dawkins says, an African tribesman is free to believe the Moon is a gourd hovering just a few hundred feet in the air ... just as scientists are free to build rockets to go there and walk on its surface. You can claim that both are 'right, in their own way' but ... well, not terribly convincingly.

This meme that 'science is just a religion' is ... well, classic theocon bullshit. Pretend that your opponent is 'equal but opposite', that things that were settled a hundred years ago are still 'controversial' or 'open to debate', that your opponent is guilty of all your sins. Convince the moderates that everyone involved is as bad as each other. Abuse nice people's inclination to be tolerant by dressing up their religion's intolerance and crime as 'tradition' or 'culture'.

The last eight years has seen fundamentalist religion do America nothing but harm during a symmetrical war between Muslim and Christian factions who agree on almost everything except the name of their god. It's not 'scientists' who have done this, it's people who find it as easy to believe in Saddam's WMDs as guardian angels.

The Salon seems to have fallen for it recently. Now, hopefully they've just seen that we all get worked up about it and so it's good for business.

Nonsense, though.

Leaving aside 'could a god exist?', just concentrating on the Christian creationists ...

It's a nuanced debate, and one of the more hilarious facts about Biblical literalists is that no two among them can agree on what the Bible actually means when it says something.

But ... on the basic points. Biblical literalists all agree that the Earth appeared in its current form suddenly and recently; that mankind was the subject of special creation through direct divine intervention; that man and the Earth inhabit a special, central place in the cosmos; that every living land creature is descended from creatures that were on a big boat during a global flood a few thousand years ago.

Science hasn't just demonstrated all of those things to be a bit wrong, it's demonstrated them to be the exact opposite of right.

And it's not scientific 'opinion' or some fad. No evidence from anywhere even vaguely supports the Biblical version of events. The *Bible* contradicts itself on pretty crucial elements of the account.

There's not even a poetic or metaphorical or symbolic way in which Adam or Noah existed. Their stories barely function as stories, in that they make precious little sense and everyone who heard them, however young they were, had almost no other possible response but to ask questions that torpedoed any semblance of story logic.

Creationists aren't creationists because they think it's what happened. They're creationists because it means they belong. They know it's ridiculous, insane stuff ... but the logic of their religion means that the more impossible things they believe, the happier their God will be. It's group identity, tribal shibboleth stuff. They aren't trying to seriously propose an alternative science, they are placing themselves in opposition to the rest of the world, the 'not we', who don't have the same beliefs.

Creationism isn't up for debate as a rival scientific model. Not because scientists are all atheist anti-theist conspirators in a scheme to discredit creationism ... but because they've gone through every single Creationist claim and demonstrated, beyond all doubt, that Creationism is nonsense.

Rove's strategy - and it worked - was that his guy only needed one more vote than the other guy to win. He didn't look beyond getting that one extra vote, and saw getting two as a waste of effort.

The direct result of that is that we have two Americas, now, and that we've fallen into the trap of thinking that there are red state Americans and blue state Americans and there always have been.

A lot of people ... a *lot* of people ... voted Republican last time because we were at war. Since then we've had catastrophe after catastrophe, to the point where the *Republican* is having to run as the maverick, we're-for-change candidate. The parallel is with the UK in 1997 - there has been a sea-change, and nothing the Republicans can do can stop it, all they can do is distance themselves from their party and hope *they're* not screwed.

'If John McCain keeps all the states Bush won in 2004, he'll win' ... well, DUH. Turn that around: Obama only needs to get a few thousand more votes than Kerry, a man with the charisma, vision and looks of a haunted tree and he's won.

Clearly, the media (including Salon) and the politicians need to maintain the illusion that this is a contest of equals and it's a divided nation and that it's going to be close ... but it really, really isn't going to come down to Ohio this time.

For a start ... three months from now, after endless days of campaigning, who do you think is going to being looking the most tired?