| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
27 Nov 2005 09:32:35 PM |
| Object: |
Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state |
From The BBC, 11/26/05:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4469590.stm
Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state
By Justin Webb
BBC Washington correspondent
We are having dinner at the house of some friends who are supporters
of President Bush.
Their five-year-old son, a classmate of our children, takes me
upstairs to see his collection of dinosaurs.
Little Meade is a passionate palaeontologist and this is a land of
plenty so the room heaves with prehistoric life.
I am suitably impressed, but unknown to Meade I am not here to admire
the bone structure of the mammals.
I am in this room on assignment, because in modern America Meade's
dinosaurs are at the heart of the travails of a political party and I
need to find out something about Meade's parents which will affect our
relationship.
I need to know what they told him about when the dinosaurs existed.
Millions of Americans, most of them supporters of the Republican
party, believe that the world was created only a few thousand years
ago as per the account in Genesis and the dinosaurs can only date from
then, so the Tyrannosaurus Rex romped around with Adam and Eve.
In other words these Americans, heirs to every scientific advance in
history, deny rational accounts of how the world came to exist.
And Meade's parents - I know his mum teaches Sunday school - might be
among them.
I put the question to Meade:
"When did the dinosaurs live?"
There is an agonising pause as he considers it.
American children are wonderfully earnest and Meade is not going to be
rushed.
Eventually he says it is in a book his Dad bought him.
We hunt the tome, find it, open the page and behold a diagram which
has been explained to Meade.
It all floods back.
The dinosaurs, he informs me with great authority and aplomb, are
millions and millions and millions of years old.
I could have hugged him and his parents; we are, after all, inhabiting
the same mental planet.
But many modern members of the Republican party, including some in
positions of great power, do not seem to be living on that planet.
Central question
As the nation recovers this weekend from the worldly pleasures of the
wonderfully inclusive festival of Thanksgiving, a festival which can
appeal equally to atheist and Bible-basher, it seems to me that the
central political question facing everyone here, far more important
than any to do with Iraq or the deficit or Guantanamo Bay, is whether
or not the Republican party, after decades of flirting, has finally
got into bed with an irrational sect.
Describe an American as a Roman Catholic and you say nothing about his
or her political and social beliefs.
Left-wing flower-power Democrats can be Catholics, so can right-wing
socially conservative Republicans.
American Jews, Hindus, even Muslims are not politically defined by
their faith.
But evangelical Christians, operating inside the Republican party,
have coalesced their energies and their resources around a set of
beliefs on homosexuality, abortion and Darwinism which place them on
the authoritarian right of every political question and at odds with
science campaigning.
For instance, to tell visitors to the Grand Canyon that this wondrous
sight is not millions of years old, which it is.
Backlash
In the state of Kansas they have succeeded in getting the science
syllabus altered so that teachers can tell their pupils that God made
everything in its current form - a change the National Academy of
Sciences said "would put the students of Kansas at a competitive
disadvantage as they took their place in the world."
This is serious stuff and Republicans who are not evangelical
Christians have in recent weeks been organising a fight-back.
They have noticed two things.
Number one, that the zealots are spending more energy fighting Charles
Darwin than cutting taxes,
and number two - and this is much more important - that the zealots
outside Kansas are not receiving the support of the nation at large.
In the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, the local school board managed
this year to get warmed up, creationism infiltrated into biology
classes, and here is what happened.
A couple of weeks ago all eight members of the board who were up for
re-election lost their seats.
"If there is a disaster in your area," the tele-evangelist Pat
Robertson told the people of Dover, "don't turn to God - you just
rejected Him from your city."
Mr Robertson is an important man:
the former Attorney General John Ashcroft teaches at his university,
and his views are sought on Supreme Court candidates and foreign
affairs.
Republican doubts
But should those views govern the Republican party?
Many members think not, particularly since President Bush is himself
in such dire trouble now.
He famously told an interviewer that when deciding to go to war in
Iraq he listened to the authority not of his dad but of a Higher
Father.
And, Republicans are daring to think, if not quite say, out loud:
"Look where that got him."
_______________________________________________________
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon
distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to
characterize the ideas of their opponents."
Stephen Jay Gould
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.rightard.org/ http://www.thedarkwind.org/
"We're going to sue your *****, AND your balls!" -- Scientology's leader
.
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