Religion Still Kills

Fortunately, such cases of blatant stupidity as the one that led to the death of an 11 year-old girl are not too common.

This kind of stupidity is precisely the one that Mike the Mad Biologist talks about in his blog, when he correctly says:

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don't do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Buckingham, who declared, "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

My response was, "In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him."

And yet, you have to admire the dead girl's parents for their foolish, criminal consistency. In fact, they are more rationally consistent than people like Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, and Sam Brownback, just to mention three illustrious evolution-deniers who are not loath to receive advanced medical treatment funded with taxpayers' money. We should hope more would be as consistent in their faith.

We should hope that those who believe that God created the earth six thousand years ago were as consistent.
We should hope that those who believe that dinosaurs boarded Noah's ark, and who use field-trips to the science museum to taint (home-schooled) children's brains with lies, were as consistent. We should hope that those who slam evolution as the root of all evil and who, in order to perpetuate that myth, make the ridiculously slanted claim that Darwinism aided Hitler's genocide of the Jews (even though the Bible prescribes genocide and Darwin never did), were as consistent.

Then--when enough such Christians (or similarly deluded believers) are as consistent as these two parents were in their ridiculous belief, and a few bacterial infections later--we could be rid of dangerous ignoramuses in a matter of few generations.