His Holiness is a wonderful source of stupidity.
His latest offering includes a generous dollop of insensitivity to boot. Upon arriving in Africa he declared that the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS contributes to the moral collapse of humanity. The traditional teachings of the Church would be a much better solution. Abstinence. Of course, it is easy. The best way of preventing the spread of a sexually transmitted disease is to stop people having sex. Brilliant!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Creating stupidity
I found a leaflet last week in the post from the local Christian fundamentalists. These are the folks who believe that the world was made just as the Bible tells us by God in 6 days.
The leaflet tells readers that it is their free choice to believe in the literal truth of the creation story described in the Bible or to believe scientific explanations about how planet earth and the life she supports came into being. For, it claims, scientific theories are just that. Theories. They do not necessarily describe the Truth. The theory that God created the world in 6 days is to this extent on the same level as scientific theory. There is no independent way of choosing, no evidence that could establish definitively which theory is true. It is a matter of faith. So it is up to the reader to choose which faith to follow.
The choice presented is twofold: Christian fundamentalism or a simplistic and inaccurate rendition of the theory of evolution. Other religious faiths and more nuanced scientific explanations do not come into the picture.
These people must be amongst the most blinkered and stupid on the planet. It is undoubtedly true in principle that science cannot claim to have discovered the Truth - science itself discovered relativism many decades ago. It is also true that the machinations of life's mystery are not covered by the theory of evolution. But to use these doubts alone to suggest that there is but one other choice, a literal interpretation of the Bible, is plain stupid.
But it is more than just plain stupid. It is the worst kind of populism. For the leaflet was distributed throughout the whole country, it came through every letterbox, trawling the entire population for stupidity.
The leaflet tells readers that it is their free choice to believe in the literal truth of the creation story described in the Bible or to believe scientific explanations about how planet earth and the life she supports came into being. For, it claims, scientific theories are just that. Theories. They do not necessarily describe the Truth. The theory that God created the world in 6 days is to this extent on the same level as scientific theory. There is no independent way of choosing, no evidence that could establish definitively which theory is true. It is a matter of faith. So it is up to the reader to choose which faith to follow.
The choice presented is twofold: Christian fundamentalism or a simplistic and inaccurate rendition of the theory of evolution. Other religious faiths and more nuanced scientific explanations do not come into the picture.
These people must be amongst the most blinkered and stupid on the planet. It is undoubtedly true in principle that science cannot claim to have discovered the Truth - science itself discovered relativism many decades ago. It is also true that the machinations of life's mystery are not covered by the theory of evolution. But to use these doubts alone to suggest that there is but one other choice, a literal interpretation of the Bible, is plain stupid.
But it is more than just plain stupid. It is the worst kind of populism. For the leaflet was distributed throughout the whole country, it came through every letterbox, trawling the entire population for stupidity.
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