Creationism

Hello. Yes, I realise I have not updated this shit for a very long time. Seasons have passed, in which there was a World Cup where a level of ineptitude and outright fuckwittery far beyond that which I predicted last spring was displayed by the England squad. Cheryl and Ashley got divorced, so I guess we won't need to be hearing anything much about them ever again. The Prime Minister now has two eyes, is called Dave, and has a little butt puppy with a yellow tie. And I didn't write about any of it. I'm not going to make any excuses, but if you choose to, you could imagine that I was somewhere where this would not be allowed, like in prison or rehab or China or something.

In any case, the subject of today's rant came to me when earlier on, it was explained to me that there are people in America (they're called Republicans, I think they're essentially like the BNP with God-knobs on) who strongly, you know, murderously strongly, believe that kids in school should be taught creationism instead of evolution and whatnot in their science lessons.

Now, science at school, as I remember it, was a bit random. I have never since encountered a bunsen burner, or that fucking thing that makes static that the teacher makes you touch so you can have your hair look shit and get mild shocks off your locker for the rest of the day. Like the musical instrument that is fundamentally two cylinders of wood that I guess you hit together like a happy little retard, the Van der Graff generator does not exist outside of schools - because what fucking Earthly use would anyone have for it. There were experiments, which of course were not really experiments at all, because you already knew what unremarkable thing was supposed to bloody happen, whether it be some water frothing up a bit or some bread going mouldy, and then there was the dissecting of some bit of a cow. I wonder who in the school employee pecking order has the job of going to beg those cow eyes and hearts off of the local abbatoir or the meat counter at Morrisons or wherever the fuck they get them. I hope it was the dinner ladies - they were disgusting people. I'd like to think that as part of their remit the foul, cellulite bingo winged harpies had to go and do that. Beg a bloke in Morrisons for cow eyes. Then take them back to school in a paper bag, oozing all over their fucking car seat. It pleases me. Regardless, if you were to split everything in the world into "stuff that is scientific" (the glomerulus, semi-permeable membranes, meth production) and "stuff that is not scientific" (Rasta Mouse, cushions, the benefits of the Toyota Prius), all of the stuff in these classes was scientific.

The concept of creationism is that thing out of the bible where God makes the world in six days (like Craig David, he chilled on Sunday), and makes Adam, the first man, out of some mud, then makes Eve, the first woman, out of one of Adam's ribs and some mud, and then Eve eats a forbidden apple because a snake tells her to and I think she gets Adam to put his chops around it too, and then they have to wear clothes and snakes don't have legs and having babies is painful. It isn't really very scientific, because science tells us that people can't be made out of mud and snakes can't talk and apples are good and childbirth hurts because it involves squeezing something that is big out of a narrow tube that is part of your body and therefore has nerves. Also, what the fuck did a snake look like when it had legs? Fucking mental, I'd wager.

This stuff is right at the start of the Bible, so most people get at least this far in. Consider it the biblical equivalent of the bit with Tom Bombadil and his weird rapey forest at the start of the first Lord of the Rings book, which is as far as I got before the fact the fucking hobbits had to fucking sing about every fucking single fucking thing (and with it being a book obviously the songs have to be represented by very gay poems about walking and eating toast) annoyed me sufficiently to stop me reading the rest of it.

I did learn this creationism malarkey in school, when I was very young, much like I learnt the nativity story, Noah's Ark, and all the other well known Bible stories. It would seem kind of ignorant not to know the beliefs on which a major religion is based, after all. But much as when you get into "Big School" the teachers stop letting you take naps and reading you George's Marvellous Medicine in daily installments, that stuff doesn't really come up any more once you're of an age where you can be trusted with naked flames. If it does, it comes up in Religious Education alongside all the equally elaborate stories from the holy texts of all the other significant religions (not Scientology though, you have to learn that later from a weirdo on the street or from Wikipedia after you were wondering what the deal was with Cruise - aside from the obvious I mean). The point of teaching you this is to equip you for dealing with people from diverse backgrounds in your adult life without inadvertently coming over as a bigoted Prince Philip style cunt (ah, Phil, I love you really), or, should you end up in a position of power, causing a really stupid war. It is not to teach you how mankind came to be.

For that you got Darwin. In science lessons.

We bloody love a bit of Darwin in England. He's on one of our bank notes (I don't know which - looking in my wallet is frankly more research than I ever put into these things), and when there was that poll of the greatest British people he either came top or near as damn it - certainly he came above Princess Diana and she was the actual queen of our actual hearts. Granted, this poll was done before we knew about Cheryl Cole so obviously things would be different now, but nevertheless, it would be bloody weird if someone said they didn't like Darwin. He was clever as shit.

Apparently, this is not the case with the American far right, who don't like Darwin and his evolution theory very much at all. A guy who was simultaneously performing an abortion, a gay wedding and a family planning clinic for teenagers would probably be more popular with the Tea Party Teabaggers or whatever the fuck it is they're called (is it actually Teabaggers or is that just a joke I've picked up somewhere? Man, I hope it really is Teabaggers). And to be clear, that guy would be popular only as a hunting trophy. These are the people who want that first bit out of the bible taught instead of evolution to the children of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Of course, this sounds fucking preposterous, and any sane person would say that whilst Christians have every right to use their faith to suppress the giant "BULLSHIT" sign that the creationism story throws up as soon as one gives it more than a millisecond's thought and believe it if they want to (not all Christians do, some see the story as a metaphor, which besides being to my mind a lot more bloody sensible, seems like a rather convenient way of explaining away a lot of the "embarrassingly stupid" stuff in the bible), by doing so they are choosing to reject the theories of science. And that in order to make that choice a person needs to know about both. This is the point. Creationism is not science. It is an alternative to science. It has as much in common with science as the ocelot has with the Soda Stream (hey, remember those? Man, I miss getting busy with the fizzy. My mate had one. Good times.). If this was a PowerPoint presentation I would now hammer home this point using a Venn diagram with two circles that don't touch at all. The evolution circle would have a monkey on it and the creationism one would have Marge and Homer as Adam and Eve, in case you want to draw it in your head. If you teach kids this horseshit as "science", depending on how much independent thought the poor bastards have left they are either going to a) never trust anything else they ever hear at school, which, to be honest wouldn't be a bad thing if these freaks are controlling the curriculum or b) grow up with some really fucked up ideas about the world.

Obviously there are dangers to this. For one thing, these kids would be robbed of that phase most normal kids go through where they think dinosaurs are the coolest thing ever, because dinosaur bones were placed under the ground by the devil to test our faith so you definitely shouldn't say, try and piece them together to see what the dinosaurs that definitely never existed looked like and then make cool exciting films of them crashing around killing stuff. But I suspect the consequences could actually be even worse than that. Armies of fucking crazy ignorant people, basically.

I find it literally impossible to understand how people can accept creationism over evolution as the explanation for the, well, for anything at all, but if people want to believe it that's their lookout. It is my duty as a lovely and beneficent person to inform them that everyone is laughing at you, you know, just in case they thought people thought they weren't mental, but hey, knock yourself out, you crazy kids. What I find even harder to believe, even harder than that really mad bit with the rib, is that anyone would accept the insistence of some fundamentalist crazies that people aren't given a chance to make up their own minds (and decide that it's bullshit. Obviously).

Incidentally, my favourite dinosaur is the brachiosaurus and sometimes I like to pretend my hand is a brachiosaurus, with the middle finger as his neck and the others as his legs, and walk him around my desk. What is your favourite dinosaur and why?