Nutjobs, nutjobs everywhere, I need a good stiff drink.

Continuing on the rant about nutjobs and their assorted nutjobbery, I would like to revisit the issue of teaching "Intelligent Design" in classrooms across the nation. Nathan was good enough to post a link in his comments to my last nutjob post. He recommended reading the Talk.Origins Archive, which is an archive of a newsgroup, called Talk.Origins, strangely enough. Give it a look, you don't have to agree with anything in it, you just have to chew on it for awhile.

Anyway, I was reading yet another article about the whole "Anti-Evolution" thing, yadda yadda yadda. Well, I was reading, and while it cause steam to rise underneath my already loose collar, I kept reading, until I came upon this bit:

The drive to bring more religion and what have been labeled "moral values" into the classroom goes beyond challenges to Darwin's theory, Scott said. The Charles County school board also proposed to censor school reading lists of "immorality" or "foul language" and to allow the distribution of Bibles in schools. In Texas, the nation's second-biggest school textbook market, the State Board of Education approved health textbooks that defined abstinence as the only form of contraception and changed the description of marriage between "two people" to "a lifelong union between a husband and a wife."

"The religious right has a list of topics that it wants action on," Scott said. "Things like abortion, abstinence, gays are higher up in the food chain of their concern, but evolution is part of the package."
[Anna Badkhen, SFgate.com]

My brain really can't take much more of this, as it just attempted to climb out my right eye socket. Of course, the right is going to take away the ability for my [non-existent] kids to have the classics introduced to them in the school, by someone whom they can have a discussion about the book with. Let's rid ourselves of "The Catcher in the Rye" because of all that steamy sexuality, oh, and get rid of "The Great Gatsby," it talks about marital infedility, thievery and murder.

Fuck that.

Oh, and as a side question, where the hell are you going to put the bible in the library? Huh? Does it go under the Religion section, where it belongs, right next to The Qur'an and the writings of Buddha? Or are you going to put it in the "Non-fiction" section, where it has no damn place? Gee, let me think... I wonder. After all, if we can teach unscientific theories in science class, then we can sure as shit push the rest of our dogma in school. It's shit like this that makes me ashamed that I was raised Catholic. Thank God my parents have some sense of reality, and taught me to think for myself.

The part that really steams my clam is that almost everyone involved on the religious right in this arguement has a scary religious zealotry that one generally finds in suicide bombers, religious terrorists, Christian militia members, etc. They're the people who won't take no for an answer, don't care how you present the evidence, etc, because you're wrong, or a "false prophet", or something like that. I got into a religious "discussion" with a guy at a bar, because he overheard me talking to one of my buddies about my belief in "evolutionary creationism", or something along that lines. He got on my back about not reading the Bible, and so on, and I asked him if he believed everything in the Bible was fact. He said yes, and I said "Then this conversation is over." I walked off, and he came over and asked me why I did that, and I told him that if his folks had given a Qur'an instead of a Bible, he'd be the same zealot but, as he said, "a godless heathen", because he believes everything he reads, and at that, stuff that was written thousands of years ago, and isn't even the complete book. Several books of the bible are kept from the public by The Vatican, because they go against some dogmatic bullshit or another. Anyway, he quoted me something about being a false prophet, and I had to grin. Right before I walked away, I said "How do I know that you're not the false prophet, or that you even exist at all? Maybe you're just a temptation from the Devil, trying to get me to serve him." Oh, that pissed him off something proper, but he didn't pursue. Fuck him.

Anyway, nutjobs need to go.