I'm thinking that every time you hear the words "Somebody ought do something", that we should remember - we ARE "somebody". I wondered in what little way I might be able to do my something about an issue I regard as very important. That is, the promotion of Creationism and its effect on the minds of young children. Remembering what and who I was growing up is the only frame of reference I have, but I can say from that experience that there were dumb kids who believed in all manner of absurdities, smart kids who were more circumspect, and the in-between kids who needed convincing. At no time in my youth was I tempted to believe in God or Satan, the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, because there was always that little voice telling me that's impossible .... no way is this true .... it's only make believe. Seeing my school buddies going off to church on Sundays talking about weird things they learned in Sunday School or describing an absurd thing called "confession" only made me more certain of my convictions.
My sister married a dolt who later became an "overseer" at the Jehovah's Witnesses and tried to explain to me that 144,000 people were going to get "raptured", and a lot of other horse crap. What he did not know was that I, at age 10, already knew more than he did about reality and delusion, and why one should never be confused with the other. And so when adults tried to represent to me some cock and bull fantastical tale out of the Bible or other myth as fact, I would either just get a good chuckle out of how stupid they were, or become indignant and irritated at how stupid they apparently assumed I was.
I was a voracious reader from a very early age, discovering books by Isaac Asimov and similar minds, and soaking up as much of the Encylopedia Brittanica as I could. I couldn't wait for Saturday to come, the day my mother would drop me off at the public library while she took care of her shopping for the week. Since this often included the feed and hardware, groceries and Montgomery Ward, I would have long afternoons to kill poring over fat science and nature books - biology, paleontology, geology, oceanography, astronomy, National Geographic. I could not get enough of it. By the time I entered middle school, the science classes were more like play than work.
It was one of these in 8th grade, taught by a guy named Chip - (yes, Chip) - where I became acquainted with the potential harm that ignorance and medieval propaganda can do. Chip was likely to bring in educational films from time to time. I can't remember the name of the film on this particular day, but it was one of those "isn't that amazing" pieces about the miraculous human body. At the end of this, the narrator sums it up by stating that (among other things) a simple red blood cell, with its function of delivering oxygen and taking out co2, was so perfectly formed for this task that it could not have been chance, that it had to have been designed that way. I recall sitting there feeling like I had been slapped. Somehow Chip had missed the fact that this little zinger had been sneaked in to the script somehow. During comments, I mentioned this and said that the filmmakers must have had some sort of agenda other than simple science education in mind, since the notion of natural systems being "created" was a religious notion, and directly opposed to scientifically accepted theory. Imagine my shock when Chip rebutted my observation saying "Who's to say evolutionary theory is correct, it's just as probable that the scriptures have it right." To have a teacher say such a thing in a science class, and receive murmured assent from most of the students, told me right then that there was a huge problem.
Mind you, this was around 1967-68. I guess a teacher could more easily get away with that sort of nonsense in those days. In modern times we are fortunate to have plenty of potential whistle blowers to sound the alarm when some Bible thumpers armed with pseudo-science and outright lies try to dress up their delusions in fancy terminology, call it Science Education or some such misnomer, and try to sneak it into science classrooms. They tried it in Pennsylvania and failed. They tried it in Kansas and failed. They are trying it in Louisiana. They built a Creation museum in Kentucky filled with the most absurd, ludicrous inaccuracies one could imagine. Nobody can actually believe this stuff and not be crazy on some level. Yet these furtive con artists continually work at fine tuning and re-wording the same nonsense to sound as if, through whatever process, the "theory" has magically somehow been transformed into a better, stronger theory vs. the massive, scientific, peer-reviewed bulk of scientific knowledge that soundly refutes it.
Children are impressionable. They must be warned at an early age that even adults who should know better are probably going to lie to them. Children should be given the ammunition early in life to defend against being persuaded to believe the unbelievable. I was lucky. I have no sense of a heaven or a hell, and my life is a much happier one for that lack of belief. I would hope for every child to be enlightened and unburdened as I was fortunate enough to be. In the interest of helping this process along, I am distributing this opinion to teachers and parents every opportunity I get. The more we remain aware of the threat of medieval mind control and what it can do to our children, not to mention our nation and our world, the more we should say about it out loud and in front of everyone, no matter who we might offend.
