..."The world, she's flat like a pancake..."

"I don't believe in evolution!"

There are a lot reasons why statements like this are given air by the talking heads in cable land.

But there's a simple logical fallacy at the bottom of it.

Evolution, like Gravity, is a theory designed to account for observable facts in the world around us.

Scientists don't believe anything.

When we observe the world around us, we come up with ideas to explain what we're seeing.

Then, we figure out how to test those ideas.

We test them, and then modify our ideas as needed.

That's why explanations are always changing. And that's why after decades and centuries of testing our ideas, modifying them, and testing again, we come up with explanations like Evolution and Gravity to explain data accumulated from diverse sources and disciplines. Evolution is like gravity or thermodynamics.

It really doesn't matter if you believe it or not.

It just is.

There are many very powerful people who don't approach life this way. Since they are inclined not to think too much about the world, their motivations, or the consequences of their actions, they build their lives on Faith.

Fundamentalism is the dead worst of this Faith-based, as opposed to Reality-based world view.

In this country, there are an increasing number of people who feel that:

Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

...these people
are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption...

millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming apocalypse....

Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?

Welcome to the 21st century.

The beginning of the new Dark Ages, if the Wrepublicans have anything to do with it.

A religion that lets the robber barons, rape, loot, and burn as much of the world as they like.