From an Opinion Piece Link -
“In fact, in case you haven’t heard, Texas Republicans want sodomy to be a crime again. Last June, the Texas Republican Party embraced a political platform that opposed the legalization of sodomy.“

Yes, I am blatantly comparing the fine Christian law makers in Texas to the fine Muslim law makers in Indonesia. Both are attempting to enforce anti-humanist morality on the people that they govern. The primary difference is the former is controlled by religious zealots who attend mosques and the latter by zealots who attend churches.

How does one justify (or even consider) governing the personal intimate lives of the constituency? The answer is you can never justify it but if framed within a religious ideal, it will find its way into the process. Religion acts like an invisibility cloak for mindless, unintelligent, pointless, puerile, and imbecilic ideas as most people of faith are trained to simply accept religious messaging without any thought. For the faith-based lawmakers, it seems perfectly reasonable to throw someone into prison for making a sex tape or getting a blow-job. In reality, it is a clear sign of mental illness to believe either of these actions would be capable of a level of harm to a society that warrants imprisonment.

“Rowthorn has developed a model that shows that the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion are currently “hitchhiking” on the back of the religious cultural practice of high fertility rates. Even if some of the people who are born to religious parents defect from religion and become secular, the religious genes they carry (which encompass other personality traits, such as obedience and conservativism) will still spread throughout society, according to the model’s numerical simulations.”

While it is humorous to encourage non-theists to double up on their rate of propagation, there really isn’t a need. Simply finding a predator of religion will be sufficient to keep it in check.

Fortunately, such a predator does already exist and it is called an education. It is difficult for well educated people to hold a belief in superstition no matter how religious they once were. It is no secret that the level of education and amount of religiosity commonly exhibits an inverse relationship. While IQ can (and does) account for some of this, being exposed to a world view will also plays a significant part in shaping the way information is processed.

Often hidden under religious programming, every brain has the ability to be rational but like most skills, it does need to be developed and exercised. The key is to start the training at a early age before those parts responsible for critical thinking are atrophied away. It seems unfortunate but once adults embed concepts with no competing thoughts (such as the earth being 6,000 years old) those higher brain functions responsible for critical thinking have perished and are not likely to return even with exposure to facts. A fundamentalist is born every time critical thinking dies.

In many ways the new battle ground between theists and non-theist is the classrooms of our children. The theists have come to understand this in recent years which accounts for their strong push for creationism in the schools. As religion has been [mostly] pushed out of most other science based curriculum such as astronomy, chemistry, geology,  et al. – biology represents a last gasp for them to be relevant in any science.  Once this foothold is lost, it is off to philosophy or mythology. Fortunately, the courts have seen through the ruse of Intelligent Design and diffused the frontal assaults on reason thus far Link. Unfortunately there are still battles to be waged against the residual fear of religious bullying and at minority of simple mindedness that managed to breach the walls of academia.

In a recent story Link it was revealed that 13% of science teachers are promoting Creationism while a majority navigate the subject of evolution cautiously and not explicitly stating it for the fact it is. This majority need to be enabled to teach the truth rather than the controversy without fear and with confidence. Link As for parents that object to teaching evolution, they need to be treated as if they were supporting the notion that storks brought babies into the world and told in no uncertain terms to STFU. We as a society can not continue to abide the fools who wish to make a mockery of the educational system; teach what stupidity you want in your home but stay out of the schools. As far as the 13% who teach creationism, repent or surrender your teaching credentials and go to the unemployment line.

There also is a need for research into what exactly faith is. People believe for a reason and over the span of time that humanity has believed one thing seems certain; it doesn’t really matter what is believed as long as it is believed. The concept of “God” has taken the form of anything from inanimate objects such as rocks rising from the desert to “Omniscience, Omnipotent, Omnipresence and can’t possibly be understood”.  Au contraire. It can be understood as the premise says less about the existence of the deity and more about the human condition that that needs such beleif as a crutch. As with most things in life, understanding the phenomena is the best way to kill the superstitions surrounding it. This is why we don’t cower under solar eclipses any more and why we should not cower under the belief that some indivisible wizard in the sky is going to send us to hell if we believe in the evidence of science.

-J