I agree with you about the threshold 100%.* It's crossing over
   and it's turning into a religion by fighting with religions.*
   There's no difference between, "Let's fight to remove religion
   from the world" and "Let's turn the world into our religion".*
   It works out to being the same thing, imho.* Neighborhood kids
   from neighboring towns fighting before the big football game.*
   Silliness and it tarnishes a portion of the scientific community
   for me.* When I find scientists who stay out of the rumble
   altogether, or are extremely careful to only point out the
   excesses (of bad science and bad religion equally, like Carl
   Sagan did) - they have my undying respect. I find myself going
   to geometry sometimes myself.* But then I get into the cognitive
   processes behind line generation and the whole question of
   symbolic representation and the whole map vs territory question.
   Still hard not to go into the geometry. I can't place my full
   trust in mathematics as a system-of-pure-truth because... I
   suppose... I'm a realist of an annoying sort: I see things as
   analogies for analogies, all the way down the line. I analogize
   thought processes as machines that have both internal and
   external impetus - the engines work anywhere there is change;
   but I don't think imagination/ideas are in a separate realm.*
   They're a part of us biologically, historically, culturally, etc
   and it's because we're using them that they have existence.* A
   lost book that no one knows about has no meaning. It's in the
   participation - the activation of the mental machines (or
   physical machines if one uses worldly elements to make things
   rather than the line-generation mechanisms of the brain).
   Anyway... this is a ramble.* I could go on about this subject ad
   infinitum... if I believed in infinity :P