To achieve recognition and acceptance, you need to have authority over Scientific Community. And to have authority, you need to have recognition. Elite is a closed club and there are no "social lifts" or "social ladders". Therefore, it is a great miracle of God if a good person receives recognition, glory, fame, and success.
Science forums attract primadonnas. They won't let anyone else post science posts because they want to be top dog. Often they have inferior educations. They try, in vain, to discredit others. These forums are certainly an elite closed club (they have friends that know that they have poor educations, but allow them to continue regardless). It is a social club, not a club of scientists.
Some science forums, like Yahoo Answers, have legitimate scientists, and they spend their time doing homework for lazy kids who post questions. These kids will never learn because they never do homework. Why, then, do legitimate scientists do their homework for them? Because many have retired and want to feel useful again. It is an ego trip.
I have answered questions on Yahoo Answers science forum, but I pick problems that I know are too hard for most to solve. Problems that might have a convenient trick to them. For example, someone asked how to find the current flowing through a three dimensional cube of resistors. I explained to them that it is a matter of symmetry and they can connect points of equal potential (that is, equal voltage). This causes the problem to break down to resistors in series and parallel (rather than a three dimensional problem). It is a matter of perception, rather than math.
In religious forums, there is a tendancy for non-scientists to use science to baffle others, then conclude that God exists. In Texas they have a saying..."if you can't win with facts, baffle 'em with bull." Since so few people know science, it is easy to fool the masses.
I am struck with the lack of scientific education of politicians. Many were speaking on the McLaughlin Group, but they made no sense. For example, they all expressed the need to fund science, but they didn't have a clue what science was all about. For example, Pat Buchanon was talking about solar system exploration, and he called it the universe. I don't hold that against him, but I worry about the funding of science projects.
An example of ignorant politicians: They canceled a project that turned a white flower purple. They didn't see the point of changing the color of a flower for millions of dollars. What they failed to understand was that, for the first time, scientists discovered genetic switches. These switches can cure cancer and other diseases. Unfortunately the uneducated have the purse strings (they pay for the projects).
You wrote that in the scientific community one needs "recognition" and science is an "elite closed club and there are no social lifts or social ladders." True.
You have to be a legitimate scientist with legitimate research in order to get published.
Sadly, there are a lot of legitimate scientists who still can't get published. Einstein was said to be a mere patent clerk when he came up with amazing theories. He was lucky that the scientific community accepted his photoelectric effect (for which he won a Nobel prize in 1905--it established that electromagnetic radiation came in discrete packets, called photons, rather than continuous waves).
Sadly, the religious community thinks of the scientific community as the enemy. That is because scientists, like atheists, require proof before they believe. Yet, many scientists, in their personal lives, are highly religious. Enrico Fermi said that electrons move by the hand of God. So, scientists don't always require proof, nor are they necessarily atheists.
Scientists can help prove ideas of theists. There was a theory about Jericho being destroyed by an ice comet. It hit 14 miles away, and made a 5 foot layer of jumbled ash all the way to Jericho, and made microscopic diamonds in the soil. Those diamonds were made under tremdous heat or pressure, so a volcanic eruption or forest fire could not have made them. Of course virtually all diamonds are found in volcanoes, but that is because the carbon was there for millions of years under tremendous pressure and heat.
Another religious idea that science proves is that the age of the universe might well be 6,000 years. This is because special relativity says that time dilates at high speeds, and general relativity says that time dilates in strong gravitational fields. So, time for us might not be the same time for God.
So, I worry that theists, once in political offices, will remove science from the curriculum. That will send us back to the Dark Ages where everyone was ignorant. It was a time of starvation, superstition (witch burnings), and disease.
Then I just have the higher golden standard of ethics. 
