Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
No, it's called placing the text in proper context and analyzing what may be meant by sections that are obvious metaphors. Science is allowed to reevaluate its position as times change and people look at things from new perspective. Religion cannot be attacked for the exact same process simply because you dislike it.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending, science tries not to make statements like "this is the absolute fact of the matter" (scientists are human, thus imperfect, and a lot have made that statement). Religious texts are hardly, if ever, coined as incomplete or lacking clarity, but instead are addressed as the sole word of truth in the world.
Religion gains its institutional authority from being the mediator between truth and people. This is exacerbated by the idea that there is a specific truth through which one must use religion and the institution to obtain and follow. This is built upon the idea that there truly is a known and correct way to engage in worship and truth aquisition. If this known process is wrong or subject to revision, religion loses much of this authority. It is soely because they have the claim on truth that religion has power, if their truth is no longer true, they lose power. Much like how the protestant reformation was as much a socio-economic movement as it was a religious movement, subjective interpretation of religious literature is corrosive to the establishment of the church, and athema to the concept of a known way to acquire divine knowledge.
Thus, the process of revision hurts the church. Because it claims to know an unchanging, divinly inspired truth, changing what that truth is defines past religious truth as errorous. Because the mechanism of knowing truth is never revised (ie, biblical scholarship, social pressure, priestly revelation) this indicates that there is no specific reason to believe that the revised truth is any closer to reality than the unrevised truth.
Science is pretty much the same, with one major exception. Built into science is the idea that no single fact is ever true, just the best current explanation. This is something lost in public debates of science, where all sides want to claim scientific superiority, as it is the narrative of authority in modern times. A democrat trying to say why science supports stem cell research will rarely point out that science is neither authoratative nor ethical (which most anti-stem cell arguments are), rendering the scientific argument moot with the exception of addressing issues of specific empirical knowledge (although, still not authoritative). To show this further, I recently asked a few of my profs questions relating to post-modernism and the how we know what we know sort of stuff, the most common answer was a laugh and addmition that we cannot really know anything, just explain what we see. The best comment was "Anything you write down is wrong", which I feel to be quite demonstrative of scientific thinking, although no in how the public conceptualizes it.
lol, I guess this turned into a bit of a rant, but summarized, the specific claims to truth that a religion makes are argued against by the act of revision. Science, while not understood well publicly, integrates the fact that we cannot ever know for sure, and thus embraces revision as something that strengthens the foundation of the "truth" revealed by its methods. Mabye attacking religion for revision is unnecessary, but it undermines any claim used by religion to maintain its authority on truth. Religion cannot simultaniously be the unaltered word of God and his directives for action on earth and subject to social pressures and historical revision. blah, I will stop there for reasons of conscision