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Creation "Science" Is the Christian Right's Trojan Horse Against
Reason
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted March 28, 2007.

---excerpt---
In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum
in
Petersburg, Ky., a 20-foot waterfall tumbles. Two life-size figures of
children with long black hair and in buckskin clothes play in the
stream a
few feet from two towering Tyrannosaurus Rex models that can move and
roar.
The museum, which cost $25 million to build and has a sea of black
asphalt
parking lots for school buses, has a scale model of Noah's ark that
shows
how Noah solved the problem of fitting dinosaurs into the three levels
of
the vessel--he loaded only baby dinosaurs.
....
Other creationist museums are going up in Arkansas, Texas, California,
Tennessee and Florida. Museums are part of a massive push to teach
creationism in schools, part of a vast Christian publishing and
filmmaking
industry that seeks to rewrite the past and make it conform to the
Bible.
The front lines of the culture wars are the classrooms. The battle is
one we
are slowly losing. Twenty states are considering changing the way
evolution
is taught in order to include creationism or intelligent design. Only
13
percent of Americans in a 2004 Gallup poll, when asked for their views
on
human origins, said life arose from the strictly natural process of
evolution. More than 38 percent said they believed God guided
evolution, and
45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a true story.2
Courses
on intelligent design have been taught at Minnesota, Georgia, New
Mexico and
Iowa State universities, along with Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon,
not to
mention Christian universities that teach all science through the
prism of
the Bible.

The museum is an illustration of the movement's marriage of primitive
and
intolerant beliefs with the modern tools of technology, mass
communication,
sophisticated fundraising and political organization. Totalitarian
systems
usually start as propagandistic movements that ostensibly teach people
to
"believe what they want." This is a ruse. This primacy of personal
opinion,
regardless of facts, destabilizes and destroys the primacy of all
facts.
This process leads inevitably to the big lie. Facts are useful only if
they
bolster the message. The use of mass-marketing techniques to persuade
and
convince, rather than brainwash, has led tens of millions of followers
to
accept the toxic totalitarian line by tricking them into believing
it's
their own. Ironically, at the outset the movement seemingly encourages
people to think "independently" or "courageously."

At first all have, in the totalitarian belief system, a right to an
opinion,
or, in short, a right to believe anything. Soon, under the iron
control of
an empowered totalitarian movement, facts become worthless, kept or
discarded according to an ideological litmus test. And once these
movements
achieve power, facts are ruthlessly manipulated or kept hidden to
support
the lie. Creationism is not about offering an alternative. Its goal is
the
destruction of the core values of the open society--the ability to
think for
oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when
judgment
and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to
challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there
are
other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially
acceptable. We are beginning to see the growing intolerance that comes
with
the empowerment of these ideologues. There is a bill in the Texas
Legislature to strip all mention of evolution from Texas school
textbooks
and institute mandatory Bible classes for all students. This is just
the
start.

And yet, coming from the modern age, these Christo-fascists cannot
discount
science. They employ jargon, methods and data that appear to be
science, to
make an argument for creationism. They have created parallel research
and
scholarly institutions. They pump out articles in self-published
journals to
provide "evidence" that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming
is a
myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something they call
"post-abortion syndrome" leads to deep depression and suicide and that
abstinence-only education is an effective form of birth control. This
pseudo-science has seeped into the public debate. It is disseminated
by
nervous and timid media anxious to give both sides in every argument.
Those
who have contempt for facts and truth, for honest research and
inquiry, are
given the same platform by the press as those who deal in a world of
reality, fact and rationality.

The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to legitimize
itself.
It achieves this imprint by discrediting real science and claiming
creationist science as true science. All attempts to argue the
creationists
out of their mythical belief, to persuade them with logic, evidence,
scientific inquiry and fact, will fail. They have created a
"fundamentalist
science." They know they cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence
that
let them believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the midst
of
their flight from reality, to reassure their followers that science,
science
not contaminated by secular humanists and nonbelievers, is on their
side. In
this they are a distinctly modern movement.

They seek the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth.
This is
a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements,
which
co-opt the disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to
give a
modern veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief systems,
systems
that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth. The
"paraprofessional"
organizations formed by the Christian right, organizations of
teachers,
journalists, doctors, lawyers and scientists, mimic the activities of
real
professional groups. They seek to challenge the legitimacy and the
power of
the traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures and
methods
employed by the non-totalitarian world, the use of pseudo-science to
dress
up fantasy, is slowly undermining our legitimate scientific and
educational
institutions. It is destroying the foundations of our open society. It
is
ushering us into a world where lies are true.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/49811/


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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Sarah Palin on evolution
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  • Article: A world where lies are true.
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