Here’s a short video [1] that takes you deep into a fundie lecture hall to be taught by the likes of Ken Ham [2]. I learned of this video by visiting a well-written science blog, Pharyngula [3] (written by biology professor Paul Z. Myers).
Watching the video is startling, disturbing and depressing. The young children are being taught to mindlessly repeat the world according to Ken Ham in order to please their teachers and parents. In this video, you can hear the kids parrotting Ham’s claim that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time, a few thousand years ago, because the Bible says so. No need to raise any serious questions or to consider whether the evidence backs up these claims. Just repeat after Ham. What Ham and these children are attacking, of course, is not evolution, even though they are calling it evolution.
As I watched, I kept thinking of all of those hungry young minds that are only a couple good questions away from seeing that Ken Ham is a fool. Or is he evil? What is the right term for a man who propogates his self-delusionals in order to bask in the adoration of the children he helps to keep ignorant?
Really, those youngsters are only a couple of good questions away from becoming seekers of knowledge, if only their parents could have the courage to let them explore new ideas with the same vigor with which they repeat their fear-induced oxymorons. If only those parents had enough faith in their own children to give their children access to both sides of the story and then step back to let their children make their own choices . . .
But no. As it often is these days, this video shows that fear and ignorance win the day.
I’ll end with a quote:
…if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
[Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir]
Print this post [4]
[5]