Adjusted for Stupidity

From The BBC 4 News Quiz:

About a survey on the belief in evolution and the age of the earth:

"I think what you need to do with a survey like that is that figures need to be adjusted like we seasonally adjust unemployment figures. We should adjust surveys for stupidity. Essentially, so, according to raw data, one in three Britains believes God created the world in the last ten thousand years. But adjusted for stupidity, noone believes that."

This got huge laughs on the BBC. I wonder how it would go over on an American quiz show.

My one argument with this clever joke is that I think the adjustment should be for ignorance as opposed to stupidity. In my opinion the vast majority of people that believe the earth is literally from 6,332 to 6,579 years old (timeline here) really are stupid but they are also ignorant of the facts and the vastness of the evidence that proves the earth is, in fact, incredibly ancient. Ancient as in the incomprehensibly vast time span of 4.5billion years give or take 1%. There is this other group of people who are not stupid, who have seen the facts, and who remain ignorant nonetheless. These people are willfully ignorant. More often than not this type of person uses this willful ingnorance to manipulate and control the actual stupid people, reinforcing the "us v. them" mindset that is essential to the control of a cult. The truly stupid ignorant people that believe the Bible is a literal history of life on earth are also told, by the willfully ignorant, that if they doubt the Bible they will go to hell.

Sorry to end a humor post on such a down note. I live in the state with the creationist museum so I am perpetually ashamed of my fellow Americans whose brains are so effectively controlled by the most evil, hateful, and willfully ignorant humans in the world. But for a smile, here's a picture from inside the creationist museum:



Parenting FAIL.

Palin and Witchcraft

Considering this may very well be the most important election of our lifetime I'm going to pile on Sarah Palin a little bit more because, well, because she's a loony right wing fundamentalist wacko. She apparently has been very upset that McCain refuses to go after Obama for his connection to the Reverend Wright. I think McCain may be more intelligent than he often appears given his own controversial religious supporters from the far right (John Hagee being the best example of the worst). But wouldn't you think Palin would have the same sense of shame considering her close association with the insane witchhunter Thomas Muthee? She doesn't. Despite this man being responsible for the murder of many people he declared "witches" she has never said a word against the man. She's part of that weird Christian cult that believes they are literally at war with Satan on earth and there there are witches and demons lurking in the bodies of other people. Here's an example of what Muthee's condemnation caused in Kenya:



Here is a link to a concise page about Sarah Palin's association with this cult.

Thomas Muthee has one of his many churches in the Kisii region, just 125 miles from Kiambu. Kisii has been the scene of many murders of people accused of witchcraft. In the latest of these incidents, in May 2008, at least eleven elderly people were killed, some of them burned alive, by a mob of hundreds that accused the victims of being witches.

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The children are beaten, starved, tied to trees and left to die, buried alive, and if they survive, are abandoned. They're treated this way because they're suspected of witchcraft, submitted to the same accusation that Thomas Muthee has used to gain power himself.

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The USA is not apart from the rest of the world. There are many people here in the United States who believe in evil witches casting satanic spells. They are trying to get leaders like Sarah Palin to "infiltrate" the government on their behalf. They are attempting to use the power of government to spread their paranoid ideas.

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