Something very troubling is going on in this country right now, and it's amazing that there's no one trying to inform people about this. Everything that is right in the world is being turned upside-down by evangelical idiots who can't bear to think that their precious little book is wrong about some things.

Creationism is a very dangerous topic. If you believe in it, you're forced to discount the entirety of science. Now, I know that science isn't a perfect discipline, but I think we can all agree that there's plenty of things that it has done that lead us to believe that scientists know what they're doing. Yet, there's still many people who want to deny such basic principles as the age of the earth. Creationists say that the earth is no more than 12,000 years old. That's nice, but science tells us that the earth is at least 4.5 billion years old. Even if the radioactive dating methods that we use aren't as accurate as we think they are, being off by more than four billion years isn't likely. Point #1 for science.

Creationists believe that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. Some evangelical conservatives have even bought a dinosaur museum lately to spread that very message. When we think about this, we've seen a grand total of ZERO fossils that show man and dinosaurs living at the same time. You would think that if they happened to coexist, there would be a fossil of a dinosaur somewhere that had a human in it's stomach. All that this shows is that people can't separate reality from fantasy, and they've watched too many episodes of the Flintsones. Point #2 for science.

The best thing of all is that the creationists believe that humans were created in their current form, and never evolved. This is completely ludicrous, as we have plenty of fossils of various species of early man, as well as a clear line of evolution from the earliest of them to our current form. If the creationists are correct, every bone found must be either human or primate, since no evolution hasd ever occurred. They cannot, however, come up with a decent explanation of all of the various skulls that have been found which display traits of both man and primate. Either they're completely wrong about what they believe in, or God is a bit of a prick. Point #3 for science.

That is what makes this so disheartening.

[A] poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

How are we supposed to deal with this? We've already seen that science has proven that evolution is at least partly true, and that creationism is utter hooey. Yet, the evangelical movement in this country has been able to gain enough of a stranglehold in this country by exploiting discrimination to be able to make people believe in this kind of garbage. The thing that no one seems to be mentioning in any of this is that religious zealots, as well as politicians, have no right to determine what is taught in a classroom. As far as I remember, science is determined and taught by SCIENTISTS, and none of the people hocking creationism fits that bill. Scientists, with virtually no exceptions, have denounced creationism as being nothing but a fairy tale. That should be enough to make everyone think that it has no place in a science classroom.

I know what some people might be thinking, but I am not trying to say that religion is evil, and that it should be banned entirely from the world. While I do think that, it has nothing to do with this argument. Creationism is fine to believe in if you're an idiot, and I'm not going to try to stop anyone from their beliefs. But, if you're going to teach creationism in schools (and I know that we're not going to be able to stop it from happening), it should be in some class other than science. If you can find a class that wouldn't object to the lesson, teach it there. Science class is made to teach science, and there isn't a single grain of science in anything that creationists speak. This is a problem that we're going to have to deal with if we don't want the entire world to be laughing at us for being any more idiotic than we already are. It's bad enough that we house people who believe that 9/11 happened because America harbors homosexuals. We don't need to make the entire country into the same kind of dolts.

Christopher M Colavito