Scary fundamentalism

Mark TwainPerusing Scientific American, February 2002. Yes, I admit I’m a bit behind with my reading… But I do not suspect the information is invalid due to the passage of a few years. Before the neo-con equivalent of the mutawa have all back issues burned and all references made illegal it is worth recording what is presented.

In the article is reported that a 2001 Gallup poll indicates that:

45 percent of Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”

The article goes on to say that the same poll suggests that 57 percent believe in creationism (as opposed to evolution or simply “don’t know”).

This is the same nation now ruled by the son of former President Bush who declared, “on the record”, that:

I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Weighing up the US’s enthusiasm for God (the Judeo-Christian one, ‘natch) and its deliverance of parts of the Middle East to a state of civil war and export of terrorism I am minded of what Mark Twain (in the The Mysterious Stranger) wrote many years ago:

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutation of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Ring any bells?

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