Clinton Tyree KM@

Now that may sound like Died-again Atheist hyperbole, but I don’t say it lightly and to merely insult Christians. And it it is mainly Christians that it refers to since I have little first-hand experience of any other religion.

I have nothing against people believing whatever nutty theories they like, but I do have serious issues in those nutty theories being given special protection within politics and education.

Again I have nothing against consenting adults getting up to whatever they want so long as it harms no one else.

But I’m afraid to say that is not the current state of affairs in Christianity. Even at a fundamental level of teaching children the Bible at school is too much for me. In terms of child development that equals brainwashing if it isn’t balanced out by a critique from an atheist viewpoint. And to be really honest, I don’t think that anything that cannot be proven should be taught as fact. Be it the Man in the Moon, the Bogeyman or God.

But scarier still we are seeing the emergence of state funded Reg Vardy Creationist schools in the UK.

Creationism is the practice of upholding that everything in the Bible regarding the origins of the planet and man are word for word correct.

Yes the British taxpayer really is subsidising a school run by a used car salesman that teaches children that the planet is under 10,000 years old! That evolution is heresy! You couldn’t make that up and be believed!

Now why the bold title? Well, if creationism goes unopposed, if religious tampering with science and policy goes unchecked we can be sure that we will be facing guaranteed global catastrophe. Indeed, the current science on climate change is incompatible with scripture. Gaia could not have been arrived at through creationism. Gaia is bound up with with science that holds that the planet is eons old, not millennia; that the planet is a self-regulating balance of parameters, not something cobbled together in 6 days by the will of an invisible man who appeared from nowhere.

If the human race hopes to survive the terrible catastrophe we have created, the solution will not be found in the Bible.

And if we want as many bright minds working on the problem as possible, state funding of Iron Age supernatural theories and Middle Eastern death cults is not a compatible strategy.

A strict policy of excluding religion from schools, as opposed to to funding it from the public purse, would also go a long way to encouraging children to exercise their human right to self-determination.