More Opinions Columnists

• V.B. Price: Preserving our water is greatest challenge the city, state faces
• Jeffry Gardner: End of The Trib is part of the demise of serious journalism
• Katherine Augustine: Time with friends from Japan provides treasured memories

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

As a matter of routine we almost immediately attach the terms "religion" or "religious beliefs" to people and organizations who believe in a supreme being.

In today's ultra-hip, pluralistic society, it's probably time we broaden our use of the terms. It's wrong to limit our immediate mental image of a religious zealot to an aging television evangelist or two.

Increasingly, by virtue of a society so successful that we've got time to burn, we're becoming a nation of activists - activists who warp our avocations into religions.

Contemporary liberalism, for example, is less about progress than it is about indoctrination. One doesn't drift from the left's orthodoxy today without paying a price that generally amounts to ridicule, derision or, if you're former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, an attempt to end your political career.

Lieberman was a good, faithful liberal. His support of President Bush's Iraq policy, however, transformed the Connecticut Democrat into a citizen of Salem, Mass. Challenged in his primary in the hope that he'd confess to witchcraft - he never did - Lieberman was defeated. He sought redemption as an independent and went through the purification of last November's Election. He won.

Most who buck against the new religions of the left are less fortunate.

For example, imagine being an environmental scientist at a major American university and questioning global warming. Last summer, MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology, Richard Lindzen, wrote that Al Gore's Academy Award-nominated documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was "shrill alarmism."

Bad move. While Lindzen admits to taking about $10,000 in the early 1990s from oil companies for travel expenses and expert witness fees - something scientists, lawyers, doctors and other professionals often do - he says hasn't taken a cent since. That didn't prevent ardent believers in man-made global warming from attempting to silence him by dragging him into a lawsuit claiming his research was faked. Nice, eh?

MIT is one of our premier institutions. And according to Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, Lindzen is "smart" and "an effective debater. . . . He isn't a fake scientist, he's an inconvenient scientist."

Lindzen aptly termed the legal suit filed against him and others "the criminalization of opposition to global warming."

This notion of global warming proponents criminalizing inconvenient beliefs dovetails nicely with the ideological war many scientists have declared on people of faith. As absurd as it sounds, scientist Richard Dawkins, among others - author of the New York Times best seller, "The God Delusion" - signed onto a petition that basically called raising children in a religious environment a form of child abuse.

Recently at a conference of scientists in Costa Mesa, Dawkins included, openly derided traditional religion, failing to see that they were every bit as fanatical about their "religion" as the believers they railed against. Probably more so.

Look: Science, politics and religion can and should co-exist. One group attempting to intimidate another group into silence simply isn't what we do in America.

Gardner is an Albuquerque writer and political consultant.