On Feb 11, 2009, at 10:49 PM, Sumant Srivathsan wrote:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5705331.ece
Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin
Response time is trending in the right direction, though. It took
them
till 1992 to admit Galileo was right:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460.600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right-.html
There goes one extreme-right-wing political agenda for the GOP. Next
up,
"stem cells aren't even fish, and we eat those, don't we?"
To be fair, these beliefs have no significant party bias in American
politics. Creationists and their brethren claim affiliation with both
parties in roughly equal measure. As counter-intuitive as it is to
many people, creationism is not a "red state" phenomenon. Indeed, the
least religious states in the United States are primarily (western)
"red" states and some of the most religious are "blue" states. The
reality is more complicated than party politics; there are two major
political parties but at least a half-dozen very distinctive socio-
cultural regions in the US.
One of the ironies of Obama winning the election was that the large
black voter turnout guaranteed the landslide success of a diverse
range of very socially conservative initiatives. While the debate is
rarely framed in such terms, the strongest reservoirs of social
conservatism in the US is in racial minorities even though many such
groups tend to have a strong Democrat voting bias.
Of course, the reality is that the percentage of the population that
is genuinely informed on any significant technically-oriented issue,
never mind the percentage that attempts to rationally evaluate such
issues, is so small as to fall below the noise floor. To the extent
that intelligent policy happens, it is almost purely accidental.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
