Watch 20 children get molested...

... mentally, of course.

The following video is fairly old, and I first watched it about three months ago, but in honour of "mock-an-easy-target month" (working title), I thought I'd post it. It's a newspiece from ABC, called "Biblically-correct tours". The premise is that two religious "fuckwits" [Thanks, PZ] take a group of home-schooled children through a legitimate museum, ridiculing any scientific aspects that don't fit with their ridiculous religious beliefs, and obfuscating everything else.



Thankfully, the newspiece is sufficiently sceptical of their nonsense, which helps to restore my tarnished faith in the mass media (and saves me a bit of typing!). Whilst watching this perversion of science, I had to pause every minute or so to involuntarily exclaim, like a Tourette's sufferer, at the absolute stupidity of what I was witnessing. Whilst this video is quite hilarious in its outright absurdity, it's also utterly infuriating.

Science isn't limited by superstitious notions that cannot be challenged - it doesn't start with a framework that everything has to be hamfistedly stuffed into. Nor is it decided in the courts. Reframing evolution as a "philosophy" or "religion" is absurd, and done only because it is not a part of evangelical Christianity. Just to further reflect on how insane this is - the Catholic Church officially accept evolution - (and the pope has a blinking-red-bat-phone direct to God!). We know that science works because people who have never talked to each other can come to the same conclusions through empirical observations; a feat lacking not only in different religious creeds, but also their spin-off denominations. These people are getting so wrapped up in the minutiae of their allegorical fables that they are beginning to unravel the progress of our civilisation as a whole!

Indoctrinating a child with religious beliefs is bad enough, but actively crippling their understanding of the world, and planting crackpot theories is absolutely child abuse. Does anyone else feel disturbed after witnessing just how shameless and brazen the efforts of the religious right are to unravel human knowledge?