Saturday, August 19, 2006

Castrate 'Em All

Joy at Telic Thoughts points us to this thread at Phyrangula in which we find Darwinians upset that so few Americans embrace the theory of naturalistic evolution. An economist is quoted as saying that:

It turns out that the United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false - and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. (Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution).

What is the penalty for this belief system? Well, you probably won't get a Science-based job - but that's about it.

The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.

That - and the lack of any sort of financial or societal disincentive for the belief system. At least so far.

One of the readers of this blog then asks whether establishing such disincentives is feasible or practical. It never occurs to him/her to ask whether it's moral. Another proposes a societal disincentive on fundamentalists - a breeding ban - and no one seems to take exception to his suggestion:

The perfect disincentive for evolution deniers: breeding bans. It's the perfect opportunity for an ID experiment. If God really exists and he loves fundaloons as much as they seem to think, he'll create their next generation ex nihilo. Dan.

Instead of calling Dan on his fascism and placing a swastika next to his name, the commenters traipse merrily off on a tangent, giving themselves to the question whether capitalist freedom is better than socialist authoritarianism. Presumably it's difficult, after all, to imagine how a breeding ban could be imposed on Christians in a capitalist system, but not so difficult to imagine how it could be accomplished under a more authoritarian regime.

Pharyngula affords us a very troubling glimpse of atheists engaged in what passes for them as moral discourse.