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I'm note sure if I have completely misunderstood your comment, but are you saying that scientists exist "just to poison the well for the benefit of the billionaire class"???

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No, not scientists. Scientists are wonderful. I'm particularly talking about celebrity scientists, especially those who ran with the new-atheist horsemen back in the 2000s and early 2010s when they were more popular. Thanks for the comment, I went ahead and edited the original one to be clearer about who I am talking about.

Also in fairness to Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson (I don't know about Bill Nye), I don't think they were adversarial toward religion. Certainly not like Dawkins.

Hawking I'm skeptical of for other reasons:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/18/private-jets...

I will not discuss his capabilities as a scientist since I'm not qualified to speak on hard physics at all - but this relationship between these people has me very skeptical of their truest intentions.

But you're right that Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson were not in the same class as Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss in particular. I'd include Sam Harris in this group too.

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