Science As a Candle in the Dark

It's sort of by accident that this week, I began reading again Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". Sagan's been dead almost a decade now, and yet this book warns very much of this time we're going through where people are basically arguing that "If you don't allow America to return to the Dark Ages, it's a war against people of faith!"

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not Ms. Science. I may work in technology, but I'm a person of faith and hope and I think I understand the power of spirituality in the lives of many humans.

But I've watched - especially during the Bush years - the wholesale destruction of critical thought, the so-called moral types arguing for the most amoral of all, and a war on science.

I've never heard science tell me how to think, or how to vote, or what to believe. I do not believe that faith and science are mutually exclusive. If you must believe in a completely literal interpretation of the Bible, you are no longer faithful because you chose to eliminate the "faith" aspect of still believing in a higher power despite the obvious errors in what the Bible contains.

Myself? I think the Bible was written by men - many different men over many different centuries. It no longer perhaps has a great deal to do with the word of God but on man's need to control society, true of most religious doctrine regardless of religion.

Despite the Bible's many contradictions, I believe. But I do not see the need to kill science and institute a period of intense mental darkness in order to further my beliefs.

The war being waged is not AGAINST people of faith but BY some people of faith against the rest of us who either do not believe or have faith even knowing the Bible tells us so many untruths. To have Kansas try to rewrite the definition of science - which is based on an ability to constantly test and analyze theories to determine whether something holds up under scrutiny - to make it include pseudoscience to me is very much an argument to return to the Dark Ages. To punish those who do not believe exactly as they do. To replace critical thought with blind membership.