Talk politics.

I've never understood the sense in how it is politically or socially viable to entertain the delusions of a group of people who really *are* stuck in a time-warp. The Creationist viewpoint is full of hoary old nostrums that Thomas Lyell and Charles Darwin debunked 150 years ago. The Creationist worldview is as follows: 6,000 years ago God created Heaven and Earth. Starlight beyond 6,000 light years is a great big lie, as God created it in situ, meaning what it records does not exist. Earth was formed from clay, and there was a literal firmament in the heavens. God also formed multiple "Kinds" (good luck ever getting a clear definition of THAT) in six days, culminating in two supermen, Adam and Eve. Then a talking snake convinces Eve to bite of the fruit, but 1,000-year old supermen build a technological civilization on par with modern society.

They of course evidently follow modern vices and so God decides it's time to wash it all away, except Noah's families. BTW, Creationism accepts as an article of Faith that Man is a hideously inbred type of animal. Eve is a kind of clone of Adam, taken from his penis bone uh, rib, yes, I meant rib. Thus all of these billions of long-lived supermen just so happen to be ridiculously inbred, helped by an understanding of genetics on par with Trofim Lysenko's understanding of biology. Thus God obliterates the world in a global flood. Ignore that Chinese and Egyptian sources march right on through the year 2438 BC like nothing happened.

Now *EVERYTHING* is ridiculously inbred and humans are perpetually declining in anything notable. God drew the continents on Earth, put all the animals there where they are. Wallace's Line is just because God's fickle like that. All cultures date to 6,000 years ago (while true in the sense that written history is only 6,000 years, there's 144,000 years that preceded that that are completely ignored by these people). There was absolutely no stone age, and Neanderthals were degenerated Nephilim, where Iapetos the Titan is a mythologized Japheth and Pan Gu is a mythologized Ham. All non-European/SW Asian peoples are Hamites, meant to labor for the benefit of the Japhethic Master Race.

Now, this on its surface is completely preposterous and absurd. There is not a scrap of evidence to support any of this. The real problem? These people also happen to be an overwhelming majority of Tea Party members. The Tea Party is overwhelmingly connected with Creationism: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2010/02/will_christian_right_join_the_tea_party.html. It is also connected to the people (mainly with investments in petroleum energy) who deny that climate change exists, full-stop. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/politics/21climate.html. In fact belief in the Creationist view of climate (namely that it doesn't exist) is also correlated with the belief climate change does not also: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/231/512/Creationism_and_climate_change_skepticism:_Not_so_strange_bedfellows.html

Hence why it's important if we evolved along with the chimpanzee from a common ancestor and both of us descended from a primordial primate prior to the K-P boundary. The same people are the ones obstructing vitally needed things for our future.

Presuming that this theory, which itself is no different than the same false ideas from the mid-19th Century (i.e. before anyone had ever even heard of Tyrannosaurus rex let alone the truly amazing prehistoric beasties) is valid, explain to me how it accounts for these phenomena:

1) The substrates that influence language families like the Sino-Tibetan and the Indo-European. Presuming that Creationist anthropology still adheres to the whole Shem-Ham-Japheth thing, it's fair to ask that if Japheth was the father of the Indo-Europeans, who then was the father of the Basques and Aquitainians and Picts?

2) Where did the Indians come from? Or Australian Aborigines? The Bible mentions nowhere in it the existence of either America (defined as Alaska-to-Tierra del Fuego) or Australasia/Oceania. So how can an honest, God-fearing Creationist accept these devil continents? And for that matter, how did in 6,000 years the 500 languages of Australia develop completely unique characteristics akin to a continental Sprachbund where Indigenous American languages are diverse enough to be as far apart as English is from Sora. And of course since the Bible nowhere mentions America, and only that which God mentions in the Bible is important to Creationists.......

3) What would an ecosystem with a mixture of mammalian megafauna (i.e. dire wolves, marsupial lions, ground sloths, and so on) and dinosaurian megafauna (tyrannosaurs, moas, dodos, carcharodontosaurs) and aquatic megafauna (pliosaurs and giant lamniforms) look like? How would it even function? How would any number of plants support populations of Amphicoelias fragilimis, woolly mammoths, ground sloths, bison, Triceratops horridus, and pronghorns all at the same time?

4) Given that in historical time the early Dutch saw the Bantu moving from the South at the same time as they arrived, how, then was the entirety of the Earth peopled in a mere 6,000 years? We're talking about a planet with entire swathes of it uninhabitable and where we are expected to believe that people would have willingly set sail across the Atlantic and Pacific (because there are no plate tectonics in Creationist theory) with outrigger canoes in a sea full of giant sea beasties that would willingly have swallowed everything imaginable.

If there are to be large-scale movements pushing this hoary old nonsense on our children & thereby handicapping our future, the least these political movements could do is explain these inconsistencies in their own mythology.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/10/25/in_the_muslim_world_creationism_is_on_the_rise/

The sad part is that Muhammad himself said whoever denies science denies God. The sadder part is that this is pretty much Ken Ham's ideas with a little Arabic spliced in. The saddest part is that the Ottoman Empire itself embraced evolution where the modern-day apparatchiki of Turkey, the state that threw out an Emperor only to copy the legal system of Benito Mussolini's Italy are inexplicably supporting an idea in Islam that arises from North American Protestantism. WTF, dude?

This is my thought on this: ( Image behind a cut for people's FLs.  )

_________________________

Your thoughts on Baptist Cultural Imperialism?