HorrifyingCreationism and Catholicism breed RACISM. There is no more glaring proof than this article.

These people will eventually be able to voteand that’s the scariest part of all.

“non-reality-based thinking”Today I drove in Illinois from the Quad Cities to Peoria.  My partner’s car has XM radio.  I just have the ‘terrestrial’ stuff in mine.
Yes, I have a CD player as well – and an IPod to plug into the tape deck on top of that.
Nevertheless, when out on road trips I like to scan the AM dial to see how loaded up it is with crap.  Surprisingly, I was able to pick up Chicago’s 820 liberal talk station – but, aside from some sportscasts, the rest of what my ‘scan’ button found today was ultra-rightwing idiocy: subs for Beck, Hannity, yadda, yadda, yadda….
Today it wasn’t anti-science but anti-history, specifically a special July 4th(5th) bizarro-world version of how and why America came into being (and I won’t even mention the anti-economic-reality of what Beck’s sub shoved at a woman in her 60s who hasn’t been able to find work in two years.)
With this kind of crap polluting the commercial airwaves – in addition to the garbage on all of the stations owned by Dobson, et. al. – is it any wonder that things are getting worse, not better or even static, regarding the sea of stupidity that we’re all forced to tread water in just to keep from drowning?

Damn you Pam,
you didn’t warn me to protect my keyboard.

Hmm“Different skin”
Let’s ignore the racism implications for a moment and just look at that please.  It sounds as if he is saying that black people and white people are two different species.  Also, just because something is pigmented another shade doesn’t make it all that different.  Are they part shark or something?  What the fundies are doing is producing a great number of ignorant people that will not bend in their beliefs.  As in do not question what our book and our interpreters of this book are telling you, but if anyone questions it, they are enemies to you and your God.  There is no way you can deprogram them as long as they are being a mutual support group for their ignorant chain of reasoning.  How can anyone tell me that anything supernatural, I’ll say it again supernatural, is based in reality?  It doesn’t even matter what it is.
If you look at various studies into superstition and how various types form as a recognition of patterns (when no patterns exist), then you can see where some if not most religions come from.  The Darren Brown test with the goldfish activating the counter, etc.  I mean, I am not so arrogant as to dismiss beliefs of 90% of the population of a planet.  But just because a lesser number believe in something other than a city in the clouds, doesn’t mean they are wrong.  Majority can’t always persevere.  That’s not progress.  I have been to TN, it’s pretty much a lost cause in regards to reasonable thought and logical as are KY and AL.  

Fabulous!I “grew up” in Chattanooga. Dayton is 30 miles away and is the location of the Scopes Trial in the summer of 1925 where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued about evolution and the (then) Tennessee law that prohibited teaching evolution in public schools.
A bunch of local businessmen wanted to “put Dayton on the map” by drawing wide attention to their town and got John Scopes to agree to be the poster boy for the show, which certainly turned into a media circus and which brought only notoriety and Bible Belt fame to Dayton.
It’s so funny/tragic to see how screwed up they are in Dayton still, even though the silly evolution law was repealed in 1967, over a generation ago. What’s that saying about the blind leading the blind?  

But I thought it wassupposed to be evolution that encouraged racism.

Old VideoThis video is from the documentary “Science Friction: Creationism” which was done in 1996.  
http://potomac9499.wordpress.c…
Interesting video but it’d probably be good to dig a little and post the source of this type of material.  I watched it thinking this was recent but it’s actually 14 years old.

That’s why the right wing repealed the Fairness Doctrine.It’s also why this country is pretty much doomed.

One of the saddest parts….Is that even someone with a 100% belief in a special Creation (“God went zap”) doesn’t have to have any issues with an ongoing evolution at all.
Any more than someone who builds a new house and furnishes it with antiques does.
It doesn’t matter if Someone created the universe 5 minutes ago, with everything in place including our memories, fossils in the ground, and things like inertia and entropy happily ticking away – science can still explain the material universe around us and make reliable predictions about its behavior.
People on both sides of the argument confuse mechanism with intent. However it got here, the universe behaves the way it does in repeatable and observable ways.
This moron of a teacher doesn’t have to say to a student “Your ideas are trash.” All he has to say is “for the purposes of this class, it doesn’t matter how it got here, this is how it behaves.”
It actually should be EASIER to explain evolution to rural kids, or anyone else who has some practical experience with things like farming or stock breeding programs. What a breeder does deliberately and with intent, random forces do over a much greater length of time.  
(I’m not defending the Creationist view – but it always particularly pisses me off when people who make claims for things won’t even pursue their own beliefs to their logical conclusions and practical applications, even following their own rules for them.)

Even worse . . .He thinks evolution doesn’t make sense because it means that “black people evolved from white people.”
It has been 85 years since the Scopes “Monkey Trial” – of course black people didn’t evolve from white people – just as humans did not evolve from chimpanzees.
But all humans have a common ancestor from about 75,000 years ago – regardless of what skin color we may have today. And humans have a common ancestor with chimpanzees from about 3 million years ago.
These kids don’t have a concept as to how long that is – and how easy it is for genetic changes to take place.
In the news this past week, soms scientists believe that Tibetans and Han Chinese have a common ancestry up to somewhere between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago – and yet evolutionary selection allows Tibetans to live at extremely high altitudes – there are three or four genes that Tibetans have selected for, that give them thinner blood with less iron (less hemoglobin), which helps them to thrive at altitudes that would sicken lowlanders.  If this could happen in 3 to 6 thousand years, just omagine the changes that can occur over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years.
But these kids and their teacher cannot comprehend the incomprehensible, except to call it “God” and then they restrict God to a creation period of 6 days that took place around 6,000 years ago.
It is sad that they can’t seem to find competetent teachers to work in these backward school systems.

No.Evolutionary theory does not have texts that preachers used to characterize slaves of African descent as “children of Ham” and destined by God’s punishment to serve the children of Noah’s other sons.
Perhaps you’re thinking of eugenics, which in the hands of some really strange people got turned into the basis for the “Aryan superman” thing over on the other side of the atlantic – and led to involuntary sterilization of people that other people thought should not be allowed to pass on their genes, over here in the U.S.

I was being ironicwith one of the common creationist claims.

It’s only taken about fifty years to seea very strong increase in Africa’s population of tuskless elephants thanks to pressure from poaching.

I was thinkingthat some of these children might want to run for office someday to foist all their ignorance on the rest of us.  That’s even scarier.

My biology teacher didn’t believe in evolutionMy high school bio teacher, like many of my teachers, was an evangelical Christian.  He told us openly that he didn’t feel comfortable teaching us the theory of evolution, but he went on to say that it was important for us to have a good foundation in biology, and there was no way around it.  So he did teach it, and he did a good job, since he was a good teacher.  I’m grateful…we could have been stuck with that guy in the video.

This is a teacher?My high school biology teacher introduced the subject, recognized that there was controversy, explained that she was there to teach the accepted scientific viewpoint, acknowledged (without commentary or bias) that there were other opinions and belief systems, and told us that she’d be happy to discuss her personal beliefs outside of the classroom.
To this day I have no idea what those personal beliefs were.  I certainly learned the principles of macro- and micro-evolution from her, though.
Thanks,  Mrs. Lisoskie.
I pity the students in this buffoon’s class.

The reason why he can’t see how blacks evolved from whitesis because it happened the other way around!
Wonder where these people are now? There should be a follow-up, to see who has been enlightened and who is still absolutely stupid.
They probably don’t believe there are places outside of TN, because they haven’t seen them. So how could the Grand Canyon exist? And don’t even point out the glacial patterns.

As a Tennessean and a native SouthernerI apologize for the stupid these people make all of us look like.
Not all parts of Tennessee or even the South are this way. Unfortunately, these backwoods rednecks tend to be the ones the media fixates on. It’s much like the TV cameras always seem to find the toothless, half-dressed, drugged up idiot to interview.
I will tell you what the problem really is down here, and I’ve actually been in schools in Dayton and taught in small rural schools before.
The problem is that the schools are full of locals who are passing down their ignorance to the next generation. Unlike the larger Southern cities that have schools full of teachers from all over the country teaching there, the rural schools tend to be filled with teachers who have lived in these areas for generations. They only left long enough to go to the closest college possible to get their degree then quickly retreated back to their safe, small-minded towns.
Unfortunately, it will continue for many more generations. I have seen it happen in my own small town back in Alabama. Even I did it. I drove 20 mins away to go to the local college, got my degree as fast as possible, and went back to teach at my old high school. I’ve seen my high school classmates do the same thing and now their children are ready to go to college to…guess what? Get a teaching degree. They’ll come right back to our small town and pick up right where their parents left off passing along the same belief systems.
The world will change around these people and move on. One day they’ll wake up and find themselves forced by law to deal with those they can’t accept and barely tolerate.

Speaking of the Southand referencing the other thread on the rural/urban divide…
In your opinion callie, is the rural urban divide even more visible in the South…I mean, it’s hard not to notice, for example, that the biggest city that has elected a gay or lesbian mayor in actually in the South and I wonder how useful it might be to describe, say, Houston or Dallas or Miami or New Orleans as every bit the “gay meccas” as even NTC or Chicago or San Francisco.

TennesseeRecently a German fundie family flew to the US. But not to any state — they flew to Tennessee. Apparently it is the state where private (and public?!) schools and homeschooling are “freest” to avoid science and facts in general. (Otherwise they could have “escaped” to Austria or Switzerland, but they regulate homeschooling strictly.)
Does somebody here know about that? I guess that it is not an accident that their laws are that way.

And don’t forgetthat the Scopes trial happened in Dayton TN, the very place where this video was shot.

Hypercanes!As is my habit, this past weekend I spent some time watching fundie TV, including Origins, the creationist program that airs on Cornerstone TV.  I listened, fascinated, as a geophysicist from the Institute for Creation Research (or what passes for a geophysicist there) explained at length about “hypercanes.”  These are, it appears, miraculously large hurricanes, created by God and unknown to scientists outside the ICR.  This scholar proved with irrefutable scientific logic, that hypercanes sent by God were responsible for the Biblical flood.  In addition, a hypercane (a miraculously undetectable one, it seems) caused the Gulf oil leak.  And since there are obviously hypercanes appearing now, we must be in the End Times.  And the conclusion he drew from all this?  Isn’t it obvious?  The Bible must be literally true and evolution is plainly false.
The goings-on in this video–the entrenched know-nothingism and government sanctioned ignorance–are clearly not the result of unionized teachers, as a recent commenter here suggested.  They are the result of fundamentalist Christianity melded with right-wing politics (“local control” of schools, among other things)–two strains of impenetrable ignorance come together in a perfect storm of imbecility.

But, a valid logical conclusion of the…creationist viewpoint is that god lied by putting fossils in the the ground he created.  He also lied by creating the cosmos with the overwheling evidence of age.  He did it just to confuse us heathen evolutionists and make the creationists feel superior, of course.  
Fundamentalists and talibangelicals don’t just avoid logic when it’s inconvenient.  They hate logic with a passion.  Logic often leads to “inconvenient truths” that show their beliefs are demonstrably false.

That’s actually kind of comforting. At least it shows maybe they didn’t cultivate that utter stupidity in just a decade or two.  I’d be afraid for more of the rest of the country if they did.      

ComparativelyI’d say that the major Southern cities are in their own little world. For the South, respective to the rural, surrounding towns, the larger cities (like here in Nashville) are by and large gay-friendly. For example, statistically, the marriage amendment that passed in 2007 wouldn’t have passed in Nashville. Even in these larger cities, there are gaytopias. East Nashville, for instance, is THE place for GLBTQ and GLBTQ-friendly people to live, but not in North Nashville, some parts of far west Nashville, or in the outlying counties. I’m not sure I’d call these cities “gay meccas” but they’re far more accepting than the rural parts of the state. I’ve travelled and worked in the rural parts of TN, including around the Dayton area, and it’s truly frightening. The car I drive has identifiable gay stickers on it, and all I can say is, I wouldn’t dare drive my personal vehicle in some of these areas.

just fyiYou are right, black people did not evolve from white people.  WHITE people evolved from black people as a result of enviroment.  Ancestry traces back to nomads who left the continent of Africa and those who settled in the European areas especially paled in pigment due to enviroment.  It was a minor beneficial mutation.