Science:

That I should be wasting time explaining to someone that we don't sit there actually trying to make monsters and/or take over the world and that Hollywood always tends to portray it as a bad guy says something about how science gets viewed in our culture, both as the cool givers of really neat stuff (consumer electronics anyone? Materials that have special properties cool much? Thought so! Medicine convenient! You can thank science for that!) and also as "Omg aah, those freaks who seem to care more about numbers or plants or animals or germs than people! Eek! And/or want tax payer money & funding to do who knows what (because I'm too lame to try to read up on any of it so I'll sit and gripe rather than try to understand it!)."

Mysticism:

Religions attempt to control our beliefs even in things outside the physical realm.
Extreme atheist skeptics try to shatter people's beliefs.
I find funny parallels between the two at times.


One may note the conceptual attack on mysticism by our culture is multi-pronged. Religions dislike it because it suggests a lack of necessity for organized religions and has historically been rather hard to subjugate and control other than through persecution and extermination. Consumer society hates it because it's really difficult to market supernatural kinds of arcane things. Science, we'd rather just plain not deal with it given the opportunity because, as you know, the domain of science and modis operandi of science people tends to be concerned with the physical world and things you can measure empirically.

Now, before you can get your anti anything-that-isn't-empirical game on, tighten your tinfoil hat a little tighter, point at & use the drugs and psychosis thought terminating cliche that Thomas Szach (sp?) was talking about, or shove a cross at me really hard this is already going to be the last entry I am going to write on this topic for a good long while to begin with...