Leave the Smart People Alone

I’m taking a break from talking about make believe to talk about a real and important issue, thought I’m sure I’ll weave in and out of fantasy as I talk. I recently read a news article about people condemning Bill Nye for trying to encourage the teaching of evolution. Evolution. A theory that is accepted by every respectable scientist, regardless of his/her specialized field of study. And my response is, leave the man alone.

I spend the majority of my time with my head in the clouds. Amazing scientific worlds where famine and disease have been eradicated from our society, and anything we desire is just a thought away. And do you know who gets us there? Scientists. And people like Bill Nye encourage scientific exploration and discovery. As much as I admire the muscled men of comic books, it’s the people with brains that are the ones who solve the problem in the end. So it is in fiction and so it is in real life.

The greatest heroes in fiction are all portrayed as intelligent. Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, Buckaroo Banzai, the list goes on. It is a cruel irony that the intelligent are praised in fiction but condemned in reality. Science is the revelation of truth. Sometimes truth is harsh. Denying it makes it no less true, it just makes your opinion false. Just because people call it “Intelligent Design” does not make it intelligent.

Stephen Hawking was both blessed with incredible intelligence and a crippling disease. Yet his detractors seem to feel this is reason to ridicule the man. Of course most of those same detractors have never even read a book written by him and could not name the field of science in which he works.

Artist's rendition of the Higgs Boson particle

I hate to feel like I am slagging on religious people, but I’m sorry, they are the ones who are leading the attack on science. Stem cell research, evolutionary biology, the Higgs Boson particle, these are things that can help mankind immensely and answer some of the big questions about human existence. The only reason religious people oppose these things is because it shows the many many falsehoods they have built their belief systems on.

"The big yellow one's the sun"

I would like to correct what I wrote in my first paragraph. Not only are people condemning Bill Nye for encouraging the teaching of evolution, he was actually booed for talking about the Earth revolving around the sun. Yes, you read that right. Now, I’ll admit that evolutionary theory is still not complete. Scientists are still learning new facts about our history and advancement from single cell organisms to what we are now. But I’m pretty sure that whole what revolves around what issue has been closed for a while now. And these are not obscure people making these anti-science claims.

Members of the United States Congressional Committee on Science are claiming that “evolution is a lie” and that “scientists read too much”. And we wonder why we don’t have a manned space program anymore. Frankly, with the amount illiteracy in this country we don’t deserve a space program. We barely deserve a chemistry set. There are people in this country who still believe that mixing Pop Rocks and soda together will kill you (and that it killed Mikey).

America used to be one of the leading countries in scientific discovery. Sadly we have abandoned the commitment to science and discovery. Now America is number one in the world for number of creationists who are also citizens. People say that Atheists are damaging to a society but one of the most Atheist countries in the world, Switzerland, just discovered the Higgs-Boson particle this past year. Meanwhile America discovered Honey Boo Boo. Something is wrong here.


(WRITER'S NOTE: I am well aware of our recent accomplishment with landing a rover on Mars. But considering what this country spends on Churches and what our government spends on needless military expenditures we should have been able to put an entire colony on Mars. Hell, we could have terraformed Mars by now if we gave all the money we give to the Religions to the Sciences instead. That's just my opinion.)