Monday, August 25, 2008

Inherit the Wind?? AGAIN???

How on Earth do theists manage to live each day as such epic failures of Humanity without realizing it is truly beyond my comprehension. Ok, fine, I concede that most moderates are usually functional members of society, who turn to God not so much out of genuine belief as much as a kind of intellectual laziness. And then there's this bright spark. Be warned, this video is not easy viewing for the sane.

I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if he was an isolated case, seeing as tony48219 is clearly delusional, obnoxious and a firm believer in the words of the great Youtube nutter and eminent psychopath, VenomfangX. As such, no normal human being capable of spelling their own name correctly, having viewed that video, would conceivably want to emulate this troglodyte, or indeed the belief system that led to his apparent mental regression to Tellytubby level. Well, I wish that were true.

tony48219 and VenomfangX are merely 2 in a long, long list of degenerates bent on riding the scriptures back to the Bronze Age. But they're just silly buggers on Youtube whose parents didn't pay them enough attention as kids! Look up names like Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Ann Coulter, Tom Willis*, Julius Streicher*, Dinesh D'Souza, Deepak Chopra, Ben Stein, Ken Ham... One name after another in a parade of charlatans and delusionals, each preaching to audiences of thousands, happily rattling off what is, at best, inane nonsense and at worst, anti-intellectualist hatred of science and reason.

And, mind-bogglingly enough, people actually believe what these cretins have to say! So much so that the world's most powerful nation** somehow manages to also be home to the largest population of dangerously gullible idiots on Earth***. This isn't hand-wavey opinion based my observations of Youtube comments (as if that wasn't enough), but empirical fact. It is utterly obscene that now, over 80 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, biology teachers in the US still have to struggle against a Bronze Age myth that an invisible man wished existence into being.

In those 80 years, we've seen the invention of jet engines, silicon chips, the Internet, digital cameras, Wonderbra, communications satellites, fibre-optic cables, genome sequencing and oh, yes, my beautiful Logitech G9 mouse with the pretty blue lights. We have witnessed the rise of new vistas of human knowledge such as memetics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cybernetics and quantum mechanics. Now, more than at any other time in human history, we have access to information such that the masses need no longer remain ignorant and subservient, but informed and active participants in the story of Humanity.

And what has religion achieved? To keep people as bigoted and ignorant as they were in the age of prophets and messiahs, living in a fantasy world of angels, demons, djinns, Heaven and Hell. To convince people that popular acceptance is a criterion of truth. To undermine the scientific method with scripture laden with errors, inconsistency and outright hypocrisy. To glorify death and murder in the name of empty promises of an afterlife. To cripple intellectual progress with blind dogmatism.

About 400 years ago, Galileo Galilei struck a blow against the Church's hubris with the heliocentric model of the Solar System. 150 years ago, Darwin showed us the interconnectedness of life on Earth. More recently, Finkelstein is showing us that most of the Old Testament is quite likely fictitious, Pinker and Blackmore, among others, are dispelling the myth of the soul, and a resurgence of skepticism is slowly picking away at the worlds of astrologers, mediums, feng shui experts and mystics.

It's high time theists showed a little backbone and took a good, honest look at the scriptures and recognised them for what they are: Myth. Allegory. Fables. Beautiful cultural artefacts in their own right, and excellent for giving a touch of poetry to an otherwise dry text, but no more a basis for knowledge, ethics and social policy than Bullfinch's Mythology, the Tale of Genji or the Cat in the Hat.

*sigh* Dammit, Cheng, what did I just say about reading happy things for a bit? Maybe I'd better just take a short holiday from the Net...

* The names of these two enemies of humanity came to my attention from RDF, in a post by the great sage and forum mod Calilasseia. Beware the wrath of the blue butterfly!

** Still the USA at the time of writing, I'm afraid...

*** This study also brought to my attention by Comrade Calilasseia. The blue butterfly is generous with wisdom.

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