The Newest Put Down
The newest way to slam a belief you disagree with -- or maybe it's not so new -- is to call it "religious." For example, "Market Fundamentalism is a quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results," and so is global warming ("The only difference between the religions right and the religious left, is that the religious right worships a man, and the religious left worships . . . Mother Nature"). As is evidence-based medicine ("as religious as possible . . . just another excuse, really -- to sneer at people"). And then there's the religion of Darwinism.
I encountered an extreme example of this sort of thing recently, from columnist Rod Dreher, who writes disapprovingly of "(Climate) science as religion" -- on a religious website called Beliefnet (which has, under the heading, "My Faith," the options Christianity, Buddhism, Catholic, Hinduism, Mormon, Judiasm, Islam, Holistic, and Angels. Dreher actually appears to be a supporter of climate science here; he's criticizing a dissent-suppressing attitude that he sees, not the actual work that's being done by the scientists in the field.
Not new, I guess, but I think that when "Beliefnet" is using "religious" as a term of disparagement, it's really gone a bit too far...