The evangelical right's anti-science hysteria is dragging this country farther and farther behind the rest of the informed, educated, and anti-superstitious countries of the world. While the rest of the world enters the 21st Century, the United States increasingly clings to the 19th. No good can come of that. The zealots need to be publicly challenged for their irrational beliefs -- when they try to impose them on the rest of us -- not publicly catered to. I am under no obligation to "respect" wacky religious beliefs when they corrupt our system of public education and influence the expenditure of my tax dollars.

Do what our ancestors did in Europe. Round up these 'religious fundamentalists' and send them to some far off corner of the world like Madagascar or New Guinea and give them a mission to convert the natives. At least they will be out of our hair. We simply don't have enough funding for our mental health facilities here in the U.S. and therefore cannot cope with the hordes of mentally ill. Finally let the ignorant spurn the public school system and let them pay for private 'Madrassas' for their children to be educated in.

Seriously though corporate America supports 'Creationism' in public because it is one way to dismiss critical thinking. Once again to establish a pliant populace, it is necessary to keep them thinking in the simplest of terms. Analysis, such as the kind used in the study of sciences, may enable the population to second guess the existing system of rule. If the population loses 'faith' in the corpocracy, then divine intervention may be necessary to get them back into line.
The United States is the most religious country in the developed world. Even Israel, a country established on the basis of religion and race, dismisses the bible in general with the majority of the people there admitting that they don't believe in the existence of a supreme being. Yet the U.S. has far more in common with countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, than they do with the Europeans or Japanese. Therefore we must accept that many of our fellow Americans are fundamentalists and that the dichotomy between an ecumenical and sectarian society won't go away in our lifetimes.

If this crud curriculum makes it into school courses, expect the next 'battleground' to be university addmissions and curicula, as these corporate-driven nut bags are beginning to find out from their deluded little darlings that what they were taught at the 'biblically-inspired' schools does not pass muster at that level (with the exeception being such low grade institutions such as Liberty University), if they are able to enter at all (as Christian conservative home-schooled students tasting a real academic atmosphere are finding out). So instead of adapting to reality, they will seek to remake reality in their own wacko image, and that has already begun with the likes of the Koch brothers endowing an economics chair at Florida State University, for example. This is not over by a long shot.

What's wanted are Proles, not deep-thinking individuals who value the freedom essential to thinking deeply that promotes the capacity/capability to protest being made to become Proles. On the current Climate Calamity thread, I discuss culture and how it can be changed. This article is about that very process being applied from the Top down.

everything is a "theory", and we should "teach the controversy"

OK, let's do that with 9/11.

Scientists have only themselves to blame. The careless use of chemicals in food, the exaggerated unjustified claims for the safety of nuclear power, and the easy way scientists allow themselves to be corrupted have led not only Christians but also people interested in organic foods and safe energy to be anti-science as well. If people, including scientists, understood what science is they would understand that science is all about predictions. No predictions, no science. Since the theory of intelligent design offers no prediction of the outcome of an experiment, it cannot qualify for an alternative scientific theory. That said, those seriously interested in science should acknowledge the limitations of Darwin's theory. The principal of “survival of the fittest” also has no predictive capacity. Science does not deal with explanations except where they lead to predictions of experimental outcomes. Since the fittest are, by definition, the ones who survive to reproduce, the formula, survival of the fittest, collapses into survival of the survivors, a tautology. But this theory the chicken is more fit than the eagle. It too offers no predictive power however many explanations it provides in retrospect.

The idea of evolution does offer some predictive power. It predicts, for example, that we won't find a ten million year old human skeleton. But this prediction is weak and empirical. Skeletons older than we thought evolution allowed are found and the theory not refuted, but simply modified. In any case the theory of evolution is about nothing more than the age of fossils.

That Darwin's theories led to Hitler makes a lot of sense, but they also led, even more directly, to unbridled capitalism. For free market theory is nothing more than social Darwinism.