Numbers from a survey flashed across the TV screen the other day. The survey says that 44% of the American public believe in the theory of evolution. That has to mean that 56% of the American population are mouth-breathing, bible thumping morons that couldn't hold up their end of an intellectual debate with a pet rock. How do I really feel?

I am embarrassed and relieved. I am embarrassed because the majority of my fellow citizens think that rigorous intellectual thought is less important than a tractor pull. I am relieved because I now see that the poor idiots of the religious right are absolutely no threat to the progress of the world. The progress of civilization has always been made by a relatively small number of the scientists, artists and technicians that search for truth in a world bent on denying it.

The demented dopes who press their will on the children of this country by enforcing the religious concept of creationism are doing a great service to the scientists and technicians of the world. They are ensuring that this nation will turn its children into intellectual serfs fit only to lift and tote goods desired by our elite -- goods the technicians and scientists create.

The congress has already raised the number of technicians that can be brought to the US from foreign lands. This trend will only continue as the pool of skilled scientists of this country shrinks. This leveling effect that will raise up the intellectually rigorous and cast down the intellectually lazy. Perhaps it is Nature's way of ensuring that the peoples of one nation will not hold dominion over all other nations forever.

To put it another way: while the just plain wrong idea of teaching creationism may seem a horrible end to an already floundering educational system, it is really the bright beginning of the end for what remains of the religious power base of the USA. By putting their eggs in the basket of revealed knowledge, they abdicate the ability to seek knowledge for themselves and thus give up their place in the future. They single-handedly will do what Marx and Mao could not.

They are making sure that their religion will be so marginalized in the next century, that all they will be left with is the rhetoric of politicians who will gladly tell them they are God's gift to the world while the politicians themselves send their own children to private schools that would never dream of elevating the crackpot concept of creationism into a course of study.

So, you see, there is reason to be hopeful. Let the masses mainline their opiate, it will only leave more power and wealth for the rest of us.


(C) 1999 - Steven Leith