God, Math, and Darwin
There’s an interesting read over at The First Church of Free Speech about our American distaste for all things Darwin.
In every poll, a majority of Americans believe that the Biblical creation story is the literal truth about how humans came into existence. And according to the Harris poll, 55% of Americans think that evolution, creationism and intelligent design should all be taught in science classes. According to the Zogby poll, a staggering 88% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 think that intelligent design should receive “equal time” in the classroom. All three polls also showed that the usual suspects are most likely to believe superstitious religious crap over science: Southerners, Republicans, those with no education beyond high school and old people. So if you’re a Southern Republican over 55 with no higher education and you don’t subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, congratulations. You’re a statistical anomoly.
I have this theory that people will generally believe in God or Big Government but not both and not neither. We programming/math nerds call this XOR, just in case you’re curious…
A connective in logic known as the “exclusive or,” or exclusive disjunction. It yields true if exactly one (but not both) of two conditions is true.
I imagine when robots are calling the shots in a few decades there won’t be a distinction between mathematician and philosopher.
…My reply was this: Great points until you get into economics. The intellectuals with Ph.Ds in econ tend to think Socialism is a great idea. The god fearing masses may be wrong about darwin but their low-tax instincts are a good thing. In other words it could be worse, we could be a nation of atheists that think Marx was on to something. Ideally we’d be pro separation of Church/State and anti-Socialist but that’s a hell of a lot to ask people who don’t want to live without either a big friendly god or a big friendly brother. Though I wonder if big governments see religion as competition (tithings vs. taxes) and subtly discourage religion, though China unsubtly encarcerates Falun Gongers.
Being the weird contrarian that I am I don’t fit into my own theory about how humans behave. I don’t believe in god or big government. Oh and I thought the finch on the flag was appropriate all things considered.
Photo by DigitalGurl
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Trackback by The First Church of Free Speech — March 9, 2006 @
Add me to the short list of anomolous people that do not pass your XOR gate test. Religeon and the state have usually been at odds through-out history. When you go back and re-read the history of the “founding fathers” you discover that they were for the most part religeonists but they all wanted to form their *own* religeons and some of them did. TThrough the Constitution they ensured that the US would have diversity in religeon and diversity in government. Don’t forget that there used to be separate states with different laws. You really could vote with your feet back then. We have lost that, let’s hope we never consolidate religeon as well.
Comment by Stiennon — March 10, 2006 @
Great picture by the way. It could be the emblem for a movement.
Comment by Stiennon — March 10, 2006 @