Enjoy the opinion excerpted below from one of the most influential persons in America, in which he supports dumbing down our society so that young people do not learn things that might cause them to question the dictated religious tenets of their parents.

——-

Wow the extremists in our political system scare the hell out of me, from both sides of the aisle.

In an article on LewRockwell.com (a conservative and libertarian site) (excerpted below), famous religionist spinwit Pat Buchanan has suggested a truly monumental step backward for our survival in this modern technological society. Buchanan is a professional spinwit, having formerly served as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, then columnist, then TV commentator, and now Editor of a magazine and frequent TV host. Oh, and he’s run for President several times but gotten nowhere.

Buchanan has suggested that under the banner of “school choice”, parents be allowed to opt out of science, and that their children would be better served by spending a year in Bible study rather than in learning the scientific theories of the development of the universe and the various forms of life.

I can respect the passion of the intensely faithful, and I understand why Buchanan would wish to permit parents to choose to shield their children from seemingly Godless science.

—–

But think about something: The reason America is still the #1 economy is that we have been #1 in technological developments of all sorts. We created the best weapons and won wars. We created the technological infrastructure to dominate today’s information society.

We indulged in splurging on scientific research through the space progam and through many forms of national-defense related research projects.

We subsidized student loans for those who wished to embrace science as their lives.

In the global competition to survive, we as a nation excelled, BECAUSE we embraced science.

Those societies that did not embrace science have not competed well on the worldwide stage (Oops, that’s kinda like Darwinism, isn’t it? Survival of the fitest.)

—-

Our leaders recognized early that it is good for our nation to have an educated citizenry. And so in the 1800s education began to become required.

As time has progressed, more and more education has become necessary in order for an individual to have a reasonable chance to compete for good jobs.

And if we want to remain a superpower, we must stay at the top of the technological heap as well. And so we must have a huge number of qualified scientific minds to fill the ranks of the research positions at all the organizations and universities in the nation.

(But in fact we already lack enough American scientists to fill those ranks, and so we have to import scientists from all around the world)

—–

Buchanan is offended over Real Scientific Theories that are at tension with a literal biblical interpretation of creation, or that refuse to attribute God as the cause of certain processes.

In a bold and extremist stroke of ignorance and dark ages thinking, Buchanan says that “School Choice” should include the choice of parents NOT to have their kids taught science, and that kids would be better off learning a year of Bible than a year of learning science.

—-

Buchanan appears to be a Biblical Creation 6-day Literalist.

I think that this 6-day literalist view is the driving force behind the attacks on science. The main reason I believe this is that there is plenty of room for God in science, as I’ve noted many times in articles in my science vs. religion category of posts. Sceince does not prove (or even try to prove) the non-existence of a divine power.

Those religionists who well-understand science already know that science and God can walk the beach hand in hand.

But science and a 6-day creation cannot walk the beach together. I have talked about that before too. See the archives.

—–

Buchanan picks on Darwinism and on the Big Bang. Those are the two theories that Creation Literalists detest the most, and those are the theories that propaganda says are most at odds with the concept of a Divine Power.

Buchanan uses a classic pre-science Catholic form of Diety proof, when he says the following thing: Science itself points to intelligent design. For most of man’s existence, we did not understand the laws of gravity, the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry. But applying those laws today, we can send a rocket millions of miles and strike a distant planet, predicting impact to the minute. But does not the existence of these natural laws imply the existence of a lawmaker?

Actually, the answer is NO, not Yes. To the Believer, Buchanan’s argument resonates. To the skeptic, Buchanan’s argument means that he would rather explain the unexplained by saying “God did it” than continue to perform scientific research to try to discover the answer.

Buchanan’s argument is in the form of the Catholic “proofs” for the existence of God, from the first millenium, updated with reference to real science.

——

If the religious fundamentalists had been in control of government spending worldwide over the past few centuries, then I doubt we would know the very scientific things that Buchanan speaks of. There is no need to study the sun and planets, since the religious authorities had already decreed that the Earth was the center of the universe (that’s just one example of how religious-dominated government works, and really worked).

Galileo was couragous enough to study the heavens despite risk of torture by the Church. But he later got busted, apparently was tortured or threatened with torture, and recanted.

Pope John Paul II exonerated him in the past few years, finally.

Buchanan and his ilk would impose a religious test on scientific research, and refuse to fund the discovery of new things once the early findings reached the point where God could be inserted as the Answer.

—-

In a final note, one day I will write about how “non-controversial” mathematical principles are actually just as much a threat to the Biblical Literalists as the Darwinian theory of evolution.

I’ll do that because the literalists like to suggest that they support science, except for the “religious belief” in the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.

I intend to try to prove that if the literalists understood more about science and math, they would see that our entire technological society is based on concepts that are threatening to the literalist belief system.

I intend to confront the literists with how they must recognize that threats come from all corners of science, and not just the Big Bang proponents and the Darwinists.

It truly IS a battle between science and non-science, on ALL fronts, not limited to the Big Bang and Darwinism, and could become almost exactly like it was in the Dark Ages.

What Are the Darwinists Afraid Of? by Patrick J. Buchanan
Our ordered universe was created out of chaos. Who or what created it? The latest theory of the evolutionists is the “Big Bang,” a gigantic explosion, eons ago, did it.

But from common sense and experience, when %u2013 ever %u2013 has an explosion created order? Explosions destroy. And if the Big Bang was due to an explosion, where did the chemicals come from? And who lit the firecracker that caused the Big Bang?

As a wag has put it, to believe an explosion created an ordered universe is like believing a hurricane roaring through a junkyard can create a fifth-generation computer.

And there are gaps in human evolution . . .

[…]

A Solomonic solution. Let parents choose between having their kids spend a year in biology class cutting up those poor frogs and being indoctrinated in evolution ideology – or a year studying the Old and New Testaments as the greatest book of Western Civilization and literature, and the basis of morality and ethics. As they say, freedom of choice.