Doofuses On the Move

Pat Robertson on his 700 Club TV show from 22 August 2005:

"You know, I don't know about the doctrine of assassination, but if he [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war…and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop…

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Pat Robertson two days later:

"I didn't say 'assassination'. I said our special forces should 'take him out'. And 'take him out' can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time."

OK, Pat. Don't try and weasel out of your statement, Pat. You called for the assassination of Venezuela's president because it was the cheapest option. Let's see. "…I think we really ought to go ahead and do it." "it" here is a pronoun and in this context in the English language, the pronoun refers to a noun that came previously in the same sentence. Is it referring to "he"? No, try again. The "we" in "we're"? Nope. "assassination"? Bingo! Pat Robertson is an evil, malevolent, lying hypcrite. And you can probably add "avaricious" to that list of adjectives. And people send money to this guy! Plus he gets on all those Sunday morning news talk shows as if he could add anything constructive to a conversation beyond castigating homosexuals and heap opprobrium on secular humanism in the name of his deity.

A study with the unwieldy title of "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" was released recently in the Journal of Religion & Society. It looked at the social performances of generally secular countries and compared 7 contrasted them with those of the United States. It concludes, among other things, that religion is not beneficial for the moral, cultural, and physical health of a society: (Emphasis is mine.)

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 most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a 'shining city on the hill' to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developing democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

The verdict obviously is not in but I'm thinking it's time to send religion back to the Middle Ages where it belongs.

Finally, there this story about the battle being waged in court by 11 parents of schoolchildren in Dover, Pennsylvania who want to drive out the religious bullshit that is Intelligent from the schools.

Eleven parents in the US have gone to court to protect the teaching of evolution at their local schools.

The Dover Area School Board in the state of Pennsylvania requires science teachers to tell pupils that evolution is merely one unproven theory.

Teachers have to say that "intelligent design" - whose adherents believe life on earth was created by an intelligent being - is a possible alternative.

The parents say it is a religious belief that should not be taught.

They argue that its inclusion violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

But wait – there's more! Here's the real scary part:

According to a CBS poll one year ago, 65% of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution; 37% would want it to be taught instead of evolution.

Yikes! What part of "it's too complicated so there must be a creator is NOT SCIENCE" don't these doofuses understand? All parents who want their kids to learn creationism instead of evolution should have their way. Upon learning the fairy story that some bearded white guy in the firmament blue snapped his fingers and created the universe, the children will then have a barcode tattooed on them which, when they grow up, means that they will not have voting privileges and must work fast food for the entirety of their natural lives. We can't have a bunch of brain-washed nattering nabobs voting another George W. Bush into office.