Seriously? You equate religious beliefs to buggering children? Why? Just because it doesn't jive with your view of the universe? And so vehemently insulting to every person of faith who crosses your path - every day, all day. How pathetically sad.
Fanaticism is a two way street. Being anti-religion is one thing and you're welcome to it. Proclaiming it loud and clear in just about everything you say it quite another. It's getting really *goshdarn* old at this point.
Probably will regret this post in about five minutes but ah well. I'll live with it.
Over and out.
If you had followed my collective works carefully, you'd note that I hold no bar for fundamentalism and for fundamentalism only.
I have nothing against religion per se, but I do have serious issues with fundamentalists and the crass and corrosive scorched earth methods fundamentalism deploys in the pursuit of social and political hegemony.
And yes, I very much equate the intellectual fraud that those men are imposing upon those innocent children as a form of buggery. After all, the root of buggery is exerting dominance and control over someone who is perceived to be weaker. I'm not speaking metaphorically, to charge they are raping the minds of those poor kids. They really are raping their minds. They are denigrating everything about that museum collection. That little museum field trip is nothing more or less than an attempt to stick a sharp rod into the brains of those kids and pith their cerebral cortex of any useful higher reasoning function.
Those kids aren't stupid. You can confusion in their faces already, because their eyes are telling them one thing--why would a T. Rex need sharp teeth to eat a frigging apple-- whereas these persons of great authority over their lives is saying something completely different that just doesn't explain the observation very well.
I've seen college age kids struggle to awaken from a life time of exposure to this sort of deceitful propaganda, and it is not a pretty sight. Those who begin to understand how they've been mistreated display classic signs of victimization syndromes. It's pretty *goshdarn* sad when they come up to you and beg, "Who can I trust?" Their problem solving skills tend to be weak. Unfortunately, what has really gone wrong for them is they've been habituated to not trust their own intuition and they doubt themselves just as much as they doubt anyone who claims to have authority.
But do I rage against all religion? Hell no. Personally, I'm neither an atheist nor am I an agnostic. Personally, my gut tells me that religion and enlightenment can not only co-exist, but they can be symbiotic as each are essentially imaginative creations of the mind of humanity. I see religions as having important cultural roles, and I think some of them are pretty interesting institutions as well.
It's only the fundamentalists--who cling so desperately orthodoxy and their pompous sense of rage against a natural order they have to imagine the stunning absurdity of a biblical flesh and blood human who is a thousand years older than his child--who see religion and knowledge as mutually exclusive.
You have to stop and blink when you see those guys say what they say to convince yourself this is really happening.
