Edit: Comments have been re-enabled. I'm curious how people are finding this post.

Most people have heard of the infamous Duggar family, whose fecundity has lately made them the darling of the media, and a total nightmare for anyone who feels any sense of ecological responsibility.

In case you haven't, they have fifteen—count 'em, fifteen—children, with a sixteenth on the way. (May I never again find cause to type "sixteenth on the way." My entire left cerebral hemisphere has painful seizures every time I even think about it.) While the family's entire Web site is an ironclad case for the idea of mandatory breeding licenses, what really ticks me off is the religious fanaticism. I expect, or at least hope, that sane, responsible Christians feel the same way.

Take a look—if you dare—at their favorite Web sites. When anyone who mentions God and Jesus at least five times in every sentence about "home-schooling," you know that they're using the term as a euphemism for a method of persuasion whose name begins with a "b" and ends with "rainwashing." And it goes without saying that the most prominently displayed link is to an electronic travesty, an affront to 0s and 1s everywhere, called Creation Science Evangelism. Look at this crock of shit—I take it back; this abomination transcends the concepts of both crock and shit. I will restate: Look at this double hogshead of tapeworm-ridden hemorrhagic sewage and pray—yes, literally, pray—that we never see this drivel taught in our public schools. (Doesn't the juxtaposition of the words science and evangelism set off warning bells?)

I rant about the Duggars not for their beliefs per se, but because they insist they have the right to force their medieval view of Nature on the rest of us Americans, while simultaneously feeling entitled to the benefits of the very science that they decry.

(Now I really don't blame the children, who, after all, didn't ask to be born to a couple of nitwits who clearly suffer from a psychological condition whose name begins with "schizophreni" and—you get the idea. Anyone care to take bets on how many of these poor kids will wind up in therapy by the time they're nineteen? Assuming they don't each have four children of their own by that age, in which case therapy can't help them.)

Mr. and Mrs. Duggar don't seem all that surprised that every one of their far, far too many children has lived a more or less healthy life so far. If they had lived 250 years ago, the Duggars would have considered themselves very lucky if as many as 10 of their 16 children survived to the age where they would become productive members of the family, and perhaps luckier still that they had both lived to the ripe old age of 40, having successfully dodged smallpox, cholera, plague, appendicitis, infected cuts, and a host of other highly lethal situations, including—and especially—childbirth.

But they don't have to feel lucky, because within the last couple of centuries, more than forty years have been added to the human lifespan (in industrialized countries), and we enjoy a higher standard of living than has ever been seen before. What has brought about all these changes for the infinitely better? Religion? Good Lord, no! It was science, performed by the rules of science: the exact same set of scientific principles that has given us the theory of evolution by natural selection and a geologic record that places the age of the Earth at about 4.6 billion years.

With this in mind, here's my proposal: anyone who wants to lobby, publicly, in favor of abandoning modern biology, should agree to forfeit all the benefits that modern biology has provided us. It's only fair. Isn't it? Is my logic sound here?

What, you need insulin? Sorry, you can't have Humulin (recombinant human insulin), because it could only have been developed as an outgrowth of recombinant DNA technology—which has sprung directly from modern evolutionary theory! Here's 50 pounds of pig and cow pancreases: your job is to extract your insulin from these, just like they did in the olden days. By the way, you'll have to do the same thing again tomorrow, and every day after that. Better get cracking—you can't live without the stuff forever! And better hope you don't become allergic to it—you'll be SOL if you do.

Yep, these wackos may suddenly change their tune if we cut off their modern medicine. No recombinant insulin, no antidepressants, none of the new antibiotics we desperately need because the germs have evolved resistance to all the old ones, and definitely—definitely—no biochemical fertility treatments.

My God protect you and grant you a long, healthy life!

Tags: evolution, fundies, rant, scary_fundies
Mood: ullllllll...
Current Tunes: Bolling, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano