>The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return

>The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research. Politicians on the other hand are more than happy to use science and the social credibility of science to coerce and manipulate though. It wasn't too long ago in terms of human generations that "the science" was that we should chemically castrate those who didn't fit traditional society's norms (like Alan Turing), or that the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels were worth the ecological catastrophe for future generations. I think a discussion on scientific ethics needs to be had by the general public as well as better scientific education all around. It's not good enough to blindly trust "the science" when there's an ethical dimension in play which there almost always is.