The Dark Age

I was going to continue my ruminations upon the baseball postseason, including an admiring recap of the first two games of the World Series, with their pleasures of intense situations and timely clutch hitting, but I was waylaid by two info bytes from the media. The first was a headline on the AOL home page, and the other was a film snippet from the coverage of Hurricane Wilma.

The AOL headline was this: Majority of Americans Don't Believe in Evolution. This was derived from a smallish survey of 808 respondents, which may or may not represent a genuine sampling, but its conclusion were appalling nevertheless. Over half those polled refused to belieive that evolution played any role in the ascendency of man; instead they simply credited good old God for making us in his image (though exactly which image is not certain--is it Yao Ming? Billy Barty? Anna Nichole Smith?) Of those who did somewhat accept evolution, the majority paired it up with God's work, stubbornly refusing to admit that it could have occurred truly impartially and with no intelligent guidance. People who think like me total less than 30% of the populace. Even most Democrats were not able to accept a Godless Darwinian apparatus.

An interesting correlation to the approximately 51% of Americans who disbelieve in the Origin of Species is the 51% "mandate" majority that President Bush received in 2004. I would imagine that correlation would be in the 90-100% range. And it explains so, so much about why we have such an incompetent President, and why we are so disdained in the world. If, as a country, we are so imprinted in our ignorance, so stubborn in our resistance to scientific principles, and so insistent that a supernatural agent is behind the variety and impermanence of every creaure and phenomenon, then we are quite deserving of the scorn that was encapsulated in the London newspaper's Election Day headline, "How can 56 million Americans Be So Dumb?" Answer: Ask the 70 million Evangelicals out there. Dumb, maybe or maybe not; brainwashed and lazy-minded, for sure.

I bet that a majority of Chinese would not poo-poo (or is it pu-pu?) Darwin's thesis. Nor the Japanese. Nor the Germans, the Russians or the French. Whatever restrictions on thought and expression their respective societies and governments impose, a healthy respect for empirical science is not among them. Which is why it has become clear to me that we are indeed in a new Dark Age, the blanket of ignorance being pulled over American society just as the domination of Christian monasteries kept progress at bay for a thousand years between the sacking of Rome and the Renaissance. Unless some miraculous enlightenment can emerge to reverse this process of stultifying religious hegemony on our culture, we will be overwhelmed by other societies in this century.

The other film clip I mentioned was of the damage caused by Hurricane Wilma in Florida, which focused on a church that was destroyed by the wind. Now I ask those who still maintain there was some theistic causation at play here, why would God send a hurricane that would destroy one of his own houses of worship? Isn't that a mite counterproductive? Did he make a mistake? Nah, impossible, because of divine perfection. And isn't he overdoing it a bit with all these Atlantic storms? We're fucking into Hurricane Alpha, already (since meteorologists refuse to name storms Xanthippe, Yolanda or Zelda). Exactly what point is God trying to make? Does he want us to sign the Kyoto Accords? If so, why hasn't he told his messenger on Earth, George W. Bush? And why isn't he attacking the apostatic Blue States?

God only knows.