Creationism is rampant

The United States is a country that was founded by puritans. An article in the NY Times last week discusses a teacher, David Campbell, who is struggling to teach Florida public school kids the theory of evolution by natural selection. Struggling because these children have not only been indoctrinated with ludicrous creationist bullshit by their parents but they've also been taught not to think, ask questions or come to conclusions on their own. They've been taught to adamantly, brutishly stand by something that they aren't, by virtue of the thing itself, allowed to question.

It upsets me greatly that people actively choose ignorance. I am disheartened by the fact that they willfully misunderstand what science tells them. The worst part? The wet blanket? It's only getting worse, thank you very much Kansas State Board of Education. The mere fact that there is a need for laws that explicitly require evolution to be taught in school is depressing. It means that there are thousands of teachers out there, teaching hundreds of thousands of students, in the name of science, that a man with a white beard waved a magic wand one day, presumably out of boredom, and we all appeared. Or worse, that perhaps out of sheer laziness, he just invented a way for it to perpetuate itself and that's where natural selection comes in.

"[Americans] have a deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, and I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately). " James Baldwin, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, January 25 1959 .