I reserve a fair portion of my contempt for idiots who do the whole personality cult thing. Darwin isn't a religious icon, he was just a dude with some ideas. You could even say the same about Jesus or Newton or Galileo. The point being that the message is important, not the messenger. If you fixate on the messenger, you've likely missed the message.
The creationist camp seems far more prone to putting people on pedestals, and assuming that everyone else does as well, though it certainly isn't restricted to that crowd. Since this is essentially a fallacious premise, I don't see anything wrong with evolutionists or anyone else dismissing Darwin as being relevant to the issue. If your point doesn't hold after you've dismissed your figureheads and sacred cows, you didn't have much of a point to begin with.
I reserve a fair portion of my contempt for idiots who do the whole personality cult thing.
Well, humans are human and hence not perfect, so we can agree on that. However, it seems to me that when in order to defend the theory of evolution you have to attack the founder, the originator, the person who laid the basis for the whole theory and who set its parameters, then I think that maybe, perhaps, it can be argued that it is the theory that is the problem and not the originator? I mean, how can the person who started the theroy by absolutely wrong in the details of the theory and the theory still be correct???????????