If you’re like me, every time you post a link to Pharyngula someone chimes in that P.Z. Myers is loud, obnoxious, aggressive, childish and – if I share his immature attitude – the discussion may as well come to a close before it even begins. Ah, yes, that horrible old curmudgeon PZ – isn’t he just the angriest person you’ve ever read?

Well, he also wrote this:

Science also has the power to transform our sense of identity. Some of us are no longer People of the Word, members of a special tribe bound together by the narratives and rules in quaint old books. We are instead the People of Reality: we are united by common knowledge, by a sense of universality, by our commitment to evidence. Personally, I find no sense of myself in the Judeo-Christian fairy tales I was brought up with–they are too narrow, too bigoted, too false. The words of my people are written in the strands of DNA I find in every cell of my body, and the story they tell is clear and inspiring. We are all products of the natural world; stars died to create the elements we are made of, and 4 billion years of churning life struggled and was born and died to shape us. We are close kin to every single human being on the planet, without exception — there is no tribe that is outside our family. And even deeper, we are related to every living thing on earth. You simply cannot get any more universal than the scientific story of life.

Well golly gee willikers, folks – he’s a poet, too.