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Tennessee "Teaching the Controversy" Bill Becomes Law
MrKevvy writes "The Tennessee 'Teaching the Controversy' bill was passed into law today. 'A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."'"
The governor adds: "However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools."
I'll go a step further: religious people aren't "people", per se. They've failed the qualifying intelligence test for classification as "homo sapiens". Accordingly, they should be treated in the same way as other inferior primates: humanely, of course, but there's no way they should be granted citizenship, suffrage or human rights.
This is, as you might guess, not a popular viewpoint (even among my fellow atheists). But before you reject it outright, or label it as flame-bait (which is NOT how it's intended), consider that religion in 2012 consist of a limited set of Bronze-age superstitions that have managed to survive -- out of a larger set, most of which didn't. As Bertrand Russell so astutely observed: "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence. It will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." We are slowly (very slowly, unfortunately) seeing that happen -- which is an entirely good thing, as any species which does not discard religion is doomed. But it's not happening without a prolonged struggle, because of course those in positions of religious power are as reluctant to surrender their positions as those in political or economic power. We have a long way to go before eveyone on this planet who actually thinks they're a human manages to meet the criteria for truly being so.