Below The Fold

I just finished watching Penn & Teller’s Bullshit episode on Creationism. I am thoroughly incensed.
Creationists who take the word of “The Bible” as literal fact are in a whole genre of stupid all to themselves.
I put “The Bible” in quotes, because you can never be truly sure which version Creationists are citing—invariably, it’s not the original version in pure Hebraic text—you know, the version supposedly handed down by god to his Chosen people that hasn’t changed in around 5,700 years. Word for word, a Torah written today reads exactly as one written millennia ago. We’ll get back to that in a second.
No, creationists really subscribe to this ridiculous belief that the world was created in six days. Now, I’m all for the right of Americans to be catastrophically stupid. But in some pissant county in Georgia, the cataclysmically stupid school board upheld that creation should be taught as a viable alternate theory to evolution, side-by-side, in the science curriculum. Side by fucking side.
What really gets me, is that these fundamentalist, bible-baring baboons are pointing at a text that was never meant to be taken literally.
Michael Drosnin wrote an interesting, if a bit shortsighted, book a few years ago called the Bible Code. In it, he basically ascertained that the Torah, in its original Hebrew text, when arranged geometrically, revealed phrases and words that seemed to be prophetic. His big coup was when he stumbled upon the prophesy of Yithak Rabin’s assassination prior to the actual event, and even tried to warn him…
Drosnin posed that if you knew the right questions to ask, you would find the answers within the “Bible Code.”
He was half right.
The truth is, Hebrew is a numerical system, in addition to being an alphabet. The Torah contains a little over 300,000 characters, that, when arranged in a geometrical pattern, lay out every single possible combination you can imagine. Basically, whatever you seek within, you shall find.
Which is the truly glorious thing about it. Not that it’s prophetic. It’s not—at least not in the literal sense of some magical scribe sitting down and writing the story before it happens. But that within this finite character set lay an infinite collection of variables—all with a clearly defined set of boundaries. It’s a perfect and holy system. And that’s good enough for me.
The fables and stories that lay on top are simply vehicles that allow this system to be explored. They mean very little, and certainly were never meant to be taken at their face value.
But this is too complex for the simple mind of the “Creationist” or, as they are now calling the movement, “Intelligent Design” theorist. What vexes me more is how they twist truths to serve their own purposes—Even Einstein believed in God. But why couldn’t God simply be the Creator who set things in motion, allowing evolution to take place? Evolution itself—Natural Selection—is very orderly—there is little random about it. Why can’t god be in these details?
Because fundamentalists are too ploddingly thick—too stupid and uneducated—to be able to grasp that concept. And they’re burrowing like insects into classrooms—there is nothing “scientific” about creationism. Legislating its teachings into public school curriculum is abhorrent to the religious separations clause in the Bill of Rights. And any foolhardy school board puerile enough to ignore the Bill of Rights and allow this rot to be taught as scientific fact should be strung up by their thumbs and lashed by olive branches and red velvet ropes.