The following paragraph is part of a short post at Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, called “Denying Truth, For Profit.”
The author correctly points out how climate change deniers have taken a play straight out of the old creationist playbook, by labeling climate change as “only a theory,” as if by doing so that somehow reduces the factualness of the information we have all been offered in support of it.
While the issue may seem less religious than creationism—which is based on getting Genesis 1 in the classroom as science, no matter what you call it—it has deep roots in that same insidious cocktail of politics, religion, and dirty money. Biblical literalists tend to believe the world is about to end. The belief has been around for at least two millennia. It is a damning and damaging belief that declares the world was made for raping because it is about to end. This deranged thinking is fueled, literally, by unrestrained economic interests. Sometimes the groups can’t see beyond the Bible to realize that they too are being screwed. Science is objective, and it is science that has been challenged by various religious and political groups since the 1920s. Today, when there is far too much information for anyone to stay on top of it all, and in an American society deeply distrustful of higher education, I smell an explosive amount of methane in the air.
Explosive indeed, and noxious as well.
People often wonder why I am so violently opposed to most organized religious movements, especially the fundamentalist varieties; here is a prime example.
Fairy tales and fantasies have a place in our world, and maybe even in our schools, but not in science or history classrooms. Everyone needs a little escape from reality from time to time, and fiction serves that need quite well. Fiction can even be useful as a teaching tool in the right circumstance, but as a substitute for scientific or historical facts it is not only useless, but counter productive and dangerous.
Those who refuse to accept science and history for what they are – factual reality – and fail to learn from them, do more than just hold themselves back in the world; they drag the rest of us, kicking and screaming in protest, into the pit of ignorance that they refuse to crawl out of.
