Pic: NASA[/caption]45% of Americans—well, people in the United States of America, which is, as far as they seem to be concerned, all of America—are retards. Not only is this truth shocking, it is dangerous and threatens all of us.
That 45% of Americans are so gravely afflicted has already caused pause for many commentators, including other Americans. The scientist and media personality, Bill Nye, for example, lamented it publicly, and not for the first time, in a YouTube video posted yesterday.
If there is consolation, and there’s not much, it only comes from the fact that for the last twenty years that the Galup polling organisation has been researching this, the figure remains relatively unchanged. So how did Galup come to its findings? Well, it asked a representative sample group if they believed in Evolution; and 45% said they didn’t.
Evolution is a fact and the Theory of Evolution—the framework of supported thought that explains how and why the fact of Evolution works—is one of the best-supported scientific theories that exists. It has been confirmed by palaeontology, through the fossil record, through genetic research which mapped the human genome and positively identifies our relationships both to other species and the first humans, through observation—the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a clear demonstration of Evolution—and by prediction; that is to say that we can posit that species living in similar environments will evolve similar traits, even though they are not closely related, and we find evidence of this in whales, for example, which were once terrestrial mammals which became aquatic so eventually came to look like fish; and here we can even see intermediate species, such as seals and sea-lions, which remain partly terrestrial but are in some ways better adapted to a marine environment. ‘Missing links’ are not missing at all, they’re everywhere!
How then, could anyone question Evolution, without rejecting the whole of science? How can anyone deny the fact of Evolution, in this modern world, and even be regarded as sane?
Well, they can’t, and this is why it is so dangerous that 45% of Americans do not accept the fact of Evolution, or its supporting Theory. Evolution denial is equivalent to rejecting all of science, and it should come as no surprise that the Evolution-deniers are also the Climate-change deniers; that most reprehensible group who believe the Earth is theirs and theirs alone, to destroy, because ’god’ gave it to them. It is clear from the ranting of religiously-deluded Americans that this is exactly what they mean to do, despite the disastrous consequences that this would necessarily entail for both America and the world. Remember: these headcases got Dubbya elected. The threat they represent is very real.
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Pic:US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration[/caption]These people’s utterly amoral religious code tells them that just believing in Jesus allows them to do anything they like with impunity. Just believing, is enough to forgive the destruction of rainforests, killing doctors, pollution on the most hideous scale, the development of toxic and environmentally-hostile technologies like Genetic Modification of plants to resist pesticides that have already caused huge damage, and the enslavement and exploitation of the planet by a hideous, rabid form of Capitalism that is utterly devoid of either morality or humanity. Just believing in their ‘god’ gives them the right to destroy the planet that everyone else lives on. America is a gun-toting, religiously-deluded redneck that menaces everyone else.
Yet the USA is also the most technologically advanced country in the world. It is arguable that the most successful elements of Post-Renaissance European culture have best been realised there. To deny the contribution of American scientists, artists, writers, and thinkers over the last 200 years would be both churlish and profoundly ignorant. When European culture was most gravely threatened, America saved it, and more than once, in the 20th century alone. What are Steinbeck, Hemingway, Pollock, Weston, and hosts of other icons of modern Western culture, if not Americans?
The power of religious demagogues within that state, therefore, has global consequences.
While, thankfully, religion is not permitted inside American Public Schools—for which fact we should be very grateful, as the rape of the planet would surely have gone faster if it had been—even this, the hallowed separation of church and state, is under repeated and consistent attack from well-funded religious charlatans seeking to gain more victims of the 100-billion-dollar a year religion scam.
It is well said that Americans have only one god and that is the dollar. The notorious Dover School case where fundamentalist Christians attempted to pervert the process of education into teaching ‘intelligent design’, an utterly bogus pseudo-science that should be laughed at, is a good example of the levels these people will sink to, in order to garner more consumers of religio-business, and to further their agenda of global destruction in the name of their ‘god’.
Those of us outside the USA should be as concerned about this trend as those inside, and while we may not directly be able to do anything about it there, we need to take firm action to ensure that the delusional nonsenses of ‘Creationism’, ‘Intelligent Design’ and the utterly risible ‘Young Earth’ poppycock are kept out of our schools. Nowhere is necessary more than in the travesty of education represented by faith schools’—schools which are funded by the Government, using tax-payers’ money, to tell deliberate lies to children.
If parents want to teach their children the faith they were brought up in, that is their right and they should be left alone to do it in the privacy of their own homes (although we should be mindful that the teaching of some ‘faiths’ amounts to child abuse,) and not by state-funded and regulated education systems.
In particular, evangelising Christian organisations, whether funded by American whack-jobs or more locally-bred nutcases, should be shown the door, right ricky-tick. I am lucky to live in a country where there is proper separation of Church and State, and this should be the example followed everywhere: no religion in schools. Culture may of course still be taught, as may the history of comparative religion, but any statement that suggests that what religions say about the origins of the universe, the world and ourselves is actually true, must be ruled out.
The whole of the United Kingdom has increasingly moved towards a non-religious position, and furthermore, the UK Government has stated that it wishes to see more people entering the ‘hard sciences’ or the so-called ‘STEM” disciplines—Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. If that is the aim, then it is absurdly illogical to allow their brains to be filled up with religious twaddle, pseudo-science and Bronze Age mythology, which we absolutely know for sure, contains not one word of truth.
It is high time to close the loophole that allows religious proselytisers into schools to confuse and pervert young children, and show religion the door. It might even help us to save the planet.
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