by There’s a lot of righteous arguing on The Internets recently concerning the way religion and science are cleverly being mashed up by fanatical Christian fundamentalists to create a whole new anti-science, anti-reality, anti-educational rhetoric that is being fed to our children as something real and true and factual when it is not. The monsters behind this religious terrorism of the mind are the same evildoers who invented the “Creation Museum” where they argue that people walked the earth with the dinosaurs even though there is a 65 million year gap between the last dinosaur and the first human.
Here’s how the radicals explain their latest decaying anti-moral duty:
A Christian K–12 school in South Carolina, with dedicated and highly qualified Christian teachers, has come under vicious attack by atheists. Why? Because one of its instructors, a fourth-grade teacher, tested her children about biblical creation, science, and dinosaurs (using AiG resources), and she has become (in)famous on many atheist websites and blogs.
The atheist buzz about the dinosaur-and-Bible quiz, however, is not really all that surprising. Over the past few years, we have seen atheists becoming more aggressive and intolerant towards Christians. … They are attempting to impose their belief system (yes, their religion) on the culture.
Rational and educated people quickly recognize the favorite cudgel of these radical Right Wing believers: propagating the Christian Persecution Complex. The world is against them. The world is trying to change them. The bad “atheists” are trying to corrupt their children with scientific facts.
What’s new and clever in this go-around, is that the fundamentalists are now conflating two things, that dinosaurs lived with people — trying to bridge the problematic “6,000 year-old age of their earth” in the Bible with the 65 million year fossil record between dinosaurs and humans — and they’re trying to now claim that atheism is a religion!
They don’t want a war between the historical record and carbon dating and fossils and empirical evidence vs. The Bible. These dinosaur-deniers want an Old Testament religious war of emotion over intellect. They want “them and us” lines drawn in the sky to clearly define their enemies on religious terms and not one of the free and intellectual mind.
That is their greatest sin against us is in this un-clever scheming to redefine our opposition to their educational child abuse by hoping to make us the monsters, when the burden of the stupidity of an uneducated and underwhelming future is happening right under their purposeful tutelage and, yes, those of us who believe in science instead of fiction, will always stand up to ridiculous charlatanism and call out every one of them into the pure light of the public square for the correction and ridicule their hatred deserves.
Interesting quiz the children took. I would like to know what their biblical justification is for concluding that people ever lived together with dinosaurs as it’s in no text I have ever read!
Here’s their faux answer — it’s all based in Genesis on Day 6, it seems:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/human-and-dino-fossils-together
I actually laughed out loud at “They are attempting to impose their belief system (yes, their religion) on the culture.” We could (and should) easily flip that exact sentence around and apply it to them… not that they would ever admit to it!
I’m glad you laughed, Emily! That shows you don’t take them seriously, even though this sort of movement is incredibly dangerous if left unchecked.
Twenty years ago, these people would have no voice and no access to minds other than theirs. The internet changed everything. Now any whacko with a web page can post their version of truth and reality and pedagogy and get away with it.
The mainstream media doesn’t help defeat these mindless liars. The media pretends they “want to tell both sides of the story” and be “fair” and so any idea in the world gets equal footing with the truth in the name of “good journalism.”
Journalism used to be about uncovering the truth and exposing the lies. Now it’s all about bowing down to power and not rocking the boat in order to keep the gravy train pumping away lies as truth.
Journalism has definitely stopped aiming for objectivity at this point, to the point that some news sources read like tabloids. This wouldn’t be too bad if we knew that everyone was going to take their news with a grain of salt and do reading on their own, but you’re right; obviously not everyone will. I don’t take what those people say seriously at all, but someone else might just scan for key words, get the gist of the story, and take it as fact. In fact that’s probably what they’re counting on.
Precisely right, Emily. We’ve given up our skepticism and we’re surprised when we’re duped as a nation. This started happening with painful repercussions in the Bush faux re-election.
How ridiculous can you get? I can remember having evidence drilled into me – both in science and the humanities, and here they are trying to rewrite the history, and science of a planet. I consider myself a reasonably tolerant person but I really fail to understand the mentality behind this type of thing. I really hope they become nominees in the Darwin Awards – ie become extinct as the dinosaurs themselves.
The mentality is political control of the nation. Get the kids. Train them to follow one thing and one thing only — The Bible — and then you can wholly control them without any fear of outsider influence like science or logic or rational thinking.
Big, conservative, money floods into these fundamentalist schools to churn out sheep that are willing to be led to slaughter in the name of the Lord. It’s the perfect way to create a whole new underclass of “Believers” who just happen to be the new indentured servant class.