Category: social dysfunction

Monkey Trials

Today, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones ruled against the Dover Area School Board's decision to insert intelligent design into their schools' science curriculum. A great ruling for anyone who prefers their science to be based less in folklore and more in, uhm, what's the word for it...oh, yeah: science.

The lawyer who argued the case for the ID sign has, predictably called the ruling "troubling." And, of course, he's crazy wrong. You know what troubling is? Troubling is when your HMO sticks you with a physician who thinks he can cure you with a prayer rug and a piece of the true cross. That's troubling. Though we admit, if we had foreseen conscience clauses that allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense drugs on the basis of religious belief, we'd have converted to Christian Scientist back in college and would be sitting on our ass at the CVS this very minute.

All of this makes an article from today's Scotsman incredibly relevant, especially if you want to ruminate on the Lysenkoist voodoo crapola from which Dover just spared itself. It's a tale about super-warriors in the service of Stalin, a healthy dose of monkey jizz, and the "expensive failure" of what is rightly called Dumbass Design.— DCEIVER

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors [The Scotsman]

READ MORE: incompetence , insane theories , intelligent design , scams and flams , seriously, what the fuck? , social dysfunction , top

God of Our Sociopathies

As our republic finds itself beset by monster storms, domestic unrest, the divisive occupation of a foreign land, it turns to the benevolent protection of its creator.

And that's when the trouble really starts. According to a study published in the Journal of Religion and Society, heavily religious democracies such as the United States lag significntly behind less pious, more science-friendly nation states in most key quality of life indicators. The study, conducted by social scientist Gregory Paul, gets this bracing executive summary in the London Times:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. . . .

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

On the other hand, a nation's rate of prayerful devotion surges dramatically when said nation is beseiged by skyrocketing murder rates and armies of clap-infected teens. Plus, you've got to figure that the Omnipotent Deity is raking all sorts of back-end royalties out of this whole War on Terror deal. We're starting to think that not only is there a God, but that He's a marketing genius--or quite possibly, Karl Rove. -- HOLLY MARTINS

Societies Worse Off "When They Have God on Their Side" [London Times]

READ MORE: public morality , religion , social dysfunction

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