I Love the Smell of Biting Sarcasm First Thing in the Morning

We love you, Scientific American (time to renew my subscription)! And thanks to Cookie Jill at Skippy who got it from libertyordeath's Daily Kos posting:

The Extremist Christian community has been screaming about the teaching of evolution in schools as if it were still a controversial issue, and there has been a concerted attempt to turn accepted scientific principles into mere matters of opinion which can be debated in a "he said, she said" format.
Scientific American wrote a beautiful editorial on this topic in their April 2005 edition. It's not available for free online, but I thought you would enjoy a few snippets.

Okay, We Give Up

. . . In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong.

Another thing that amazes me: the people who call themselves good Christians today (besides that many of them do not practice Christianity outside of their own minds) believe that faith has to be blind.

Why then did God or whatever creator(s)/power(s) are out there help us develop such a beautiful and complex mind with the phenomenon of free will? Was it a joke? Do you think it's like the apple on the Tree of Knowledge; something the snake tests you with and to show you're good, you have to refrain from eating it?

See, my God, I believe, gave us those minds and that will to actually use them for more than a shapeholder for our dyed, teased, artificially implanted and toupeed hair. My God doesn't get challenged because somebody may believe differently, or chooses to use that mind to try to figure something out. My God didn't write the Bible (men did that - and I'm not always sure they did a good and faithful job). My God doesn't get offended with questions, although (s)He might wonder why we don't ask more of them in a time when we're so clearly adrift (my God also doesn't think bullshit makes for the best rescue/life line because it smooshes apart when you try to pull on it.

And heck, my God created Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Jonas Salk, Sigmund Freud, and a pantheon of other scientists.