World News Korner

2013 was NOT a good year for Evolution.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

Never mind the increasing evidence—64 percent of white evangelical Protestants reject the science, and professors at Christian colleges are attacked if word gets out they teach it.

Evolution did not fare well in 2013. The year ended with the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Doubt as Amazon’s top seller in the “Paleontology” category. The state of Texas spent much of the year trying to keep the country’s most respected high school biology text out of its public schools. And leading anti-evolutionist and Creation Museum curator Ken Ham made his annual announcement that the “final nail” had been pounded into the coffin of poor Darwin’s beleaguered theory of evolution.

Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.

The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.

The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments.

So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?

Well that is pretty simple actually, because they are taught to believe rather than to think.

Because they are a wealthy and powerful demographic they are targeted by the Republicans and Religious Right to keep them as undereducated as possible. After all wasn't it Sarah Palin who eschewed the virtues of a college education and suggested a trade school for young people instead?

You know, like beauty school for instance.

And when they are not attacking educators living in "ivory towers" they are going after anybody who is living their lives directed by logic rather than faith.

"How will you know how to solve your problems if you do not reach out to God for guidance?"

I don't know, perhaps by educating yourself and learning how to deal with complications that may arise in your life? Just crazy enough to work.

But the Religious Right realizes that time is not on their side. Not with Google providing immediate access to information about virtually any question that one could ask, and with science making incredible discoveries on a daily basis.

Soon there will come a day when nobody will feel the need to rely on faith to provide answers, nor religious affiliations to provide a sense of community. Instead we will all be connected by the technology that mankind created to facilitate a global community, and have our needs met, in a far more satisfying way, via logic and science.

And nothing frightens those who make a living spreading ignorance, and fear, and divisiveness more than realizing their days are numbered.

If Creationism shows up at all in a science textbook then this is the only acceptable way for it to be included.

I could live with this.




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