You're inventing a dichotomy where none exists. By your definition, everyone who has posted in this thread, as well as every physicist and most laymen are in your "cult".
Nobody says this. The actual situation with SR is as I described it in the PM I sent you: SR asserts that all the laws of physics are Lorentz invariant, and all the most accurate physical laws that we know about are Lorentz invariant. So a century after it was first formulated, SR is a fact about all the physics we know about, and at the very worst an excellent approximation of reality. It's been confirmed well enough that the old ideas of absolute space and time are certainly gone forever.
An important point is that no matter what we discover in the future, SR already has demonstrated uses and can never turn out to be less useful than it has already shown itself to be. People working with GPS or designing the sort of accelerators that are being used for their medical applications are always going to need to know SR to do their jobs. So while there is always the possibility we might discover Lorentz violations at some insanely high energy scale, it's never going to turn out to be so wrong that the anti-relativity crowd will have any good reason to cheer about it.
This is almost a strong enough acknowledgement of tentativeness to keep you in the cult but I’m not sure you really want to be, lol. Maybe you want to be a fence sitter.
But you are wrong if you think that almost everyone posting here is in the cult. I conclude that you are saying that more from the position that everyone here will acknowledge tentativeness at some level, but you see, the cult members do not flame each other in order to shut them up or in order to stroke their own egos. They try to teach each other and when they have gone as far as they have the inclination to go with teaching they just exit, they don’t ad hom and exit claiming evidence they have falsifies the premise of the thread without doing the teaching that is necessary.
I’m not objecting to flaming, I’m saying that flamers cannot be held in respect by cult members. That isn’t a very monumental statement because who cares if they are in the cult. Most here would rather not be in it. Being excluded makes them happy as I’m sure you agree, and it gives them one more opportunity to flame us.
Cult members stick together and either respond patiently, don’t acknowledge the flamers, or do not let flaming go by without returning the flaming in-kind. If you allow flaming to go by without comment you are not a proclaimed cult member even if you hold tentativeness as one of the strengths of science. You may still be an unproclaimed cult member if you want to be. If you condone unprofessional behavior from professionals and you let the non-professional flamers stroke their own egos and go unchallenged when you have every opportunity to take a stand for the cult, you are not in the cult. Be happy, right?
As for your presentation, no one in the cult is saying SR has not been useful or that characteristics of relativity will not be part of any new consensus should there ever be one. If anyone, including MD claim that, they are not in the cult, lol.
Also, “insanely high energy scales” only need to be “relativistic” enough to prove differences between SR and reality and if that were to occur, your characterization of it being “insanely” relativistic would be an overstatement if not wrong. Making statements like that implies to me that you do not accept the strength of tentativeness or do not accept that it endures even in the face of the strong consensus theory over lengthy durations.
Our expanding universe is finite and the Hubble volume of space that contains it is causally connected to the Big Bang. Everything in that arena tests positive for Lorentz invariance as far as we know. I’ll give you that, and expect if you are in the cult you will give me leeway as to what lies at the heart of particles within that Hubble volume of space as well as what might lie beyond the Hubble volume of space, i.e. preconditions to the Big Bang.
I don’t agree that I’m “inventing” a dichotomy where none exists. I’m saying that science is tentative and that tentativeness is one of the strengths of science. I think science professionals conduct themselves professionally and though flaming between professionals is good sport and well understood, professionals flaming laymen is not done in the spirit of peer camaraderie, it is done with disdain.
You may say that the fact that there are degrees of tentativeness allows you to sit on the fence and all I’m saying is that fence sitters are not cult members.
