Cyborg Democracy and Dale Carrico have both commented on The Turning of the Tide post by TangoMan. Later, Dale has a follow up post where he fingers (perhaps) a yawning chasm between "GNXP" and himself. He states:

Why is it so often the case that so many of the ones to whom you would want to look for allies in the cause of championing a more scientific and hence more democratic culture seem at once so susceptible to bamboozlement by the kinds of scientism that confuse prescriptions for descriptions, confuse parochialism for the defense of truth, and self-congratulation for modesty itself?

On the point about prescription and description, I have advised caution about making the ought -> is fallacy many a time, for example:

...science is fuzzy and flexible enough that you can generally extract some "natural" justification for your given normative position. Biology is more useful I suspect in clarifying the plausible paths of implementation, and the obstacles one needs to surmount...It still leaves room in the end for a variety of terminal positions.

And speaking of prescription and description, why does a scientific culture imply a democratic one???

When it comes to being narrow-minded, well, one can not be all things to all people. If you are the type of person who suspects that "science is just another superstition," there simply is no common ground for discourse. Similarly, if one accepts the literal truth of the Bible, unless you are open to some mental gymnastics that redefines "literal" in a fashion I would not recongize, I suspect that there is little point in engaging in a discussion on this weblog. But, that leaves a rather broad umbrella under which you can take shelter, whether you are a Left, Right or Other, atheist or theist, black, brown, yellow, white, male, female, etc. As for banning snark, well, delicious rhetoric tends to warm the hearts of fellow travellers but gets in the way of opening substantive avenues of discourse with those who you disagree with (and I think talking to people you disagree with respectfully is far more fruitful than not, sometimes you find out you are wrong!!!)....

Related: Dale's incredulity about the possibility that some on the Left are tabula rasa believers led me to reread The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, published in The Nation about 8 years ago....