Our Founding Timelords Opposed Evolutionism

"As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!"- David Barton - (Whose qualifications as a historian consist of being a true American Christian White man asserting that the Founding and other Great Fathers have always agreed with him.) 




I've mentioned to several people several different ways that the concept of doublethink is not some hellishly new and exotic evil dreamed up by Orwell for his fiction or by the tyrannies he satirized and metaphored.  Doublethink is as old and as common as the human tendency to consider oneself better than others by whatever pretense.  Most of us are aware that there are laws of science that determine reality and laws of logic for finding them.  But for most people these laws are only distant abstractions. It is the society that we live in and interact with every day that is in practice the ultimate reality of a persons life, and so it's natural that a chauvinistic sense of social entitlement will lead to a half-conscious  belief in one's ability to invent truth with his mouth.   

The privileged classes of every society will always come to see paternal wisdom as something exclusive to themselves, an essence that they are born with, and are bound to be sorely insulted by any suggestion that they should have to go through the trouble of learning things before they can be wise.  And it goes without saying that this conceit will make those who hold it stupid.  Sarah Palin states increasingly bizarre things about Paul Revere because she honestly believes that whatever is right because she says it, and she's getting a boost from Nietzschian  supporters now inventing truth  by rearranging Revere's Wikipedia article to suit her newly-created facts.

I think that the rise of religious fundamentalism among the religiously prone in an increasingly secular world is somewhat related to this conceit.  It's no accident that Christian fundamentalism in America, which explicitly offers its followers the right to dictate and impose social norms and cultural identity, is most popular among well-to-do White suburbanites.  People who are used to getting their way and being catered to and fear the loss of these indulgences.

This is counterproductive in the end.  When a belief that whatever you say is by definition right leads you to state that Daniel is the most important Jewish prophet,  you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.