This is NOT a Christian bashing article. It is an ignorance bashing article!

Last night I watched an interesting documentary about a school board of a small town in PA that created quite a ruckus by forcing Creationist views in the their science classrooms in 2005. The reason why I bring this up is because there is an obvious correlation between some religious fanatics, racists, and fanatic right-wingers. These are small minded people isolated in small towns and quite disconnected from reality. Essentially two board members lied about buying a bunch of books titled "Of People and Pandas" and brought these books into the science classrooms. At the time Bush was endorsing Creationism, conveniently repackaged as Intelligent Design. He told our kids that ID is a legitimate scientific alternative to the popular Evolution theory. WOW! We were all concerned our black president was going to brainwash and ghettofy our kids, yet Bush is pushing ignorance like ID? The judge in the case was appointed by Bush, the deck was stacked against intellectualism once again.

In order to define science, it is important to understand it's roots. We typically view modern science beginning with the Renaissance including characters like Galileo, Newton, etc. Did they just appear by an intelligent agent? No! The Renaissance marked about 2000 years after the creation of modern scientific thought. The ancient Greeks were the first culture to separate the pursuit of knowledge from their religious beliefs and their language makes up about 15% of the English language consisting of mostly scientific and technical terms like "technology". The same people who told stories of Helios carrying the sun behind his chariot are also the same people that discovered our planet was a sphere, calculated it's circumference within less than 1% accuracy, knew the Earth and several other spheres rotated around the sun all about 2000 years before Galileo discovered the same thing. WHY! Religious nut cases becoming politically powerful and not liking their stories being contradicted decided to create the largest intellectual cover up in history.

Nearly all of the conflicts between modern science and Christianity come from the Jewish text, the Old Testament. Most conservative Jews explain that the stories of Genesis and other books were not written by people claiming to be scientists. They were religious people telling a story about their understanding of the kosmos from a perspective dating back 4000 years. These are people without microscopes, laboratories, etc. These are sheep herders. The people who originally wrote this stuff don't take it as literally as these idiots that borrowed it.

When the Western Roman Empire fell and Europe sank into the Dark Ages, there is a little gap here in what we are taught in school about why ancient Greeks knew about all this stuff, but the same European countries they once occupied all the sudden slipped into ignorance. What happened to Math, Science, Philosophy, Art? How did we go from Archimedes and Heron to King Arthur and Dragons? Why did everyone all the sudden wake up in a Renaissance ending over a thousand years of ignorance? We are conveniently told the story that the only copy of this Greek knowledge burned in the library of Alexandria during the Roman times. BS! If this knowledge was still considered valid at the time, then why was there only one copy...IN EGYPT and not GREECE? You mean everyone in the ancient world just got amnesia and placed all their vital knowledge in one library with one copy? This story makes NO SENSE! There was a cover up. It threatened the emerging political religious leaders of the early Christians.

The Academy in Athens was very famous in Ancient times. An educated Roman would learn Greek (the language of the educated) and go to Athens to learn about Math, Science, Art, etc. Latin was the language of the commoner. When the Roman Emperor Justinian waged war on the pagans, he closed the Academy forever and executed many of the teachers who refused to believe in Jesus. Temples were destroyed and the intelligence that once made Athens so great was destroyed with them. Lucky for Galileo and us that a Greek named Alexander conquered a people called the Persians. He shared his culture with them and they translated many books into Arabic about all this acquired knowledge. If it weren't for the Persian's interest in what they learned from the Greeks, they would have never had their golden age while Europe was in it's darkest time ever. We like to remember our few victories during the crusades, but gloss over how these Muslims beat them bad and eventually won. They were more advanced technologically and eventually the Moors who invaded Spain brought this Greek knowledge back into Europe just before a cultural event known as the Renaissance. All the sudden Galileo is discovering things about our universe that were once common knowledge to people 2000 years before.

Now. The Creationists in the school board case claimed that Intelligent Design was in fact science and deserved a fair amount of attention in the classroom. The teachers opposing them felt this was simply religion repackaged as an excuse for science and should be taught in Sunday School. The teachers had to prove that it was not legitimate science and the school board had religious motivations over educational ones. First, the methodology of beginning with the answer and backtracking is not acceptable scientific method. Science is the pursuit of the unknown with no predetermined outcome. The school board was found to have lied under oath and were disingenuous about their intentions. My favorite piece of evidence was the "evolution" of the textbook as illustrated by the publisher providing all the drafts leading up to the version in question. Between two revisions the words Creationism, Creator were literally swapped with new words like Intellectual Design, Intellectual Agent, yet everything else stayed the same. One of the cut and paste actions left behind a fossil if you will. Where Creationism was substituted for Design, the 'C' and the 'ISM' were left behind with substituted words in between. A smoking gun showing the intentions of taking a book once billed as a Creationist text that was repackaged as a Scientific text. Further more Biologists were able to show that their theories of Evolution were currently being verified by the emerging science of genetics. They proved that humans share genealogy with apes and chimps through DNA. Two different forms of science confirmed each other's existence.

The lawyer from the right-winger Bushies, creationists was also discovered to be part of an organization called the Wedge. Their #1 agenda was to replace Evolution as the predominate scientific view for explaining our existence with Creationism. They are a rich and powerful organization made up of people like these lawyers. The disturbing combination of the religious wacko, the republican lawyer, and the destruction of education and intellectualism combined with the foremost  insistence that man didn't come from monkeys also correlates with many racist ideologies that blacks come from monkey yet whites do not. We're all monkeys, you racists! This is the core of these fanatical beliefs. Race, Religion, Anti-intellectualism, and Politics are all combined to make up the modern Republican wacko. THIS IS NOT ALL REPUBLICANS, but all these nut cases are Republicans! How does it feel to be in the company of the dumbest, blindly religious, antiquated, racist, small towners who exemplify everything wrong and self-destructive about humankind dating back to the beginning of the unbiased pursuit of knowledge 2000 years ago?

The judge ruled in favor of the teachers and true science despite his original connections with Bush and the Church. He was placed under police protection because of death threats resulting from his decision. One of the teachers winning the case for science is also a minister.