Illogical Thought

Today I’m mainly quietly seething about illogical and superstitious morons who want to destroy the relatively sophisticated view of the world that we’ve built up over the last few hundred years. And, no, I’m not talking about muslims (though they certainly fit the bill). In this case I’m talking about christians.

It started this morning when for some reason I was reading on Wikipedia about faith-based schools. I was surprised to read how many of them there are in Britain (6,955 christian, 36 jewish, five muslim and two sikh). I got angrier as I read about how the Emmanuel Schools Foundation teaches creationism (or “intelligent design”) to its pupils and that the Prime Minister is happy with this. I was reminded of a piece that Richard Dawkins wrote in the New Statesman about his programme The Root of All Evil?. In this programme Dawkins looked at Accelerated Christian Education, a christian school curriculum that is being used in a small number of private schools in the UK. Dawkins wrote this:

One of my TV locations was a London school that follows the (American) Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) syllabus. The day after watching my show, three colleagues told me they had interviewed, for a place at university, a young woman who had been taught (not at the same school) using ACE. She turned out to be the worst candidate they had ever encountered. She had no idea that thinking was even an option: her job was either to know or guess the “right” answer. Worse, she had no clue how bad she was, having always scored at least 95 per cent in exams – the National Christian Schools Certificate (NCSC). Should my colleagues write to Ofsted about ACE and NCSC? Unfortunately, Ofsted is the organisation that gave a rave review to Tony Blair’s pet city academy in Gateshead: a Christian school whose head of science thinks the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog.

Then Candace pointed me at this piece about how unacceptable it is to call yourself an atheist in the US.

You can be elected as an openly gay politician in this country, but you can’t be elected as an openly atheistic one

That’s bloody scary. I know it’s about the US and not the UK, but there’s a worrying trend for us to follow the Americans’ lead in matters like this.

The Today programme this morning contained an interview with “John Henry, a professor of mathematics, who wants to see intelligent design taught in schools”. How you can be a professor of mathematics and support something as illogical as intelligent design, I really don’t understand.

So it’s all very depressing. It’s like the Englightenment never happened and we’re plunging back into the Dark Ages.

There was one piece of good news, the American Association for the Advancement of Science have issued a statement calling for mainstream religious communities to support the teaching of evolution in US schools. but I can’t see it having much effect and I’m becoming less and less convinced that this religious resurgence can be stopped.