July 2013 ~ Support It

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

The Great Atheist Follow List Blunder

Posted on 16:01 by Unknown

Looks like sad Manuel de Dios Agosto has boobed again. He's published the following list of Atheist's Twitter accounts on his blog asking people to spam-block them and to file false reports in his panic to prevent the truth about him being circulated.

He's spent most of today putting in the usual focussed fanatical effort of the seriously psychotic, no doubt gloating at the 'devastation' his latest 'brilliant' plan to silence Atheists will have, following his latest warning from Twitter about his abusive behaviour - and has succeeded in producing one of the best sources for great Atheist tweeters on Twitter.

I commend this list, though I haven't checked them all. Manuel's idea of an Atheist may not be that of normal people and probably includes people who have merely disagreed with him, so exercise caution. I've removed one fanatical Christian from the list.

A word of warning: only follow a few every day or you could get algorithm suspended for 'aggressive following'.

Has anyone yet made a Twitter list of these? If not, I'll do it when I have time. Enjoy, and please follow people back if you're on this list. It would be a shame to let Mad Manny's day's work at the keyboard go to waste.

[Update] Manny's List is now in alphanumeric order and searchable.

Not sure if you're there? Just add # followed by your Twitter account name (without the @, case sensitive, no spaces) to the url in your browser address bar and hit return.

For example http://rosarubicondior.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-great-atheist-follow-list-blunder.html#RosaRubicondior

Should find you if you're in the list. If you're not and want to be added, nag me with a comment below.

If you just want to follow the entire list, TeslaRanger has a Twitter List here, or SILONDN has one here which can be followed with a single click. Or, you can check each out for yourself before deciding.

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Monday, 29 July 2013

Religion to Disappear By 2038

Posted on 13:06 by Unknown

Nigel Barber: Atheism to Defeat Religion By 2038

In a recent book. Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky, by Nigel Barber he makes a very strong case for thinking atheism will have replaced religion across the world as a whole by 2038, in other words within the next generation.

Accepting the evidence showing a very strong correlation between the wealth of a country, measured by per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - a measure of average wealth generation - he arrives at this by taking two measures of Atheism:

The projected date by which the average country will reach the 2004 GDP of the nine most godless countries - Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom (proud to see the UK up there!) who transitioned to Atheism in that year. The International Monetary Fund gives an average annual increase in GDP of 3.33%.

Relative religiosity - that is, how important people think religion is in their lives. When they regard it as unimportant they become functionally atheist - in other words, they behave like perfectly normal atheists do - and a country in which more than 50% of the population regard religion as unimportant has effectively become a secular society. On this measure, taking Gallop Organization data, the most godless countries are Spain, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, Uruguay, Germany and France. This has been increasing at a rate of 1% per annum.

Incidentally, that figure of 1% is exactly the figure reported for the USA between 2004 and 2013 by YouGov poll a few days ago, although the rate of increase appears to be increasing there, being 1.2% for the five years from 2008 to 2013.

Projecting these two measures forward gives, on the first measure, a date of 2041 as the world transition point. The second measure gives 2035. Averaging these gives the most likely date at around 2038.

Barber dismisses the minority view of political scientist, Eric Kaufmann, who has projected differential birth rates forward and has concluded that religious people will out-breed atheists, pointing out that as religious people become more prosperous, not only do they become less religious, but their birth-rate falls. Kaufmann's prediction also seems to me to have ignored the fact that most atheists either were formerly religious and have de-converted, or were born to religious parents. Kaufmann seems to be treating religion as an incurable congenital condition rather than a treatable memetic infection.

I wish I could say I was completely convinced by Barber's prediction but there are of course a lot of assumptions underpinning it.

Firstly, it assumes that per capita GDP will continue to rise at the previous 30 year's rate and that this will be more-or-less uniform throughout the world.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you - then you win.

Mohandas K Gandhi

Secondly, that there will not be increased resistance to losing faith when people realise they are losing a irreplaceable source of excuses for not taking responsibility for their own actions and behaviour, and something to blame for their personality defects.

Thirdly, those who earn a living from or otherwise depend on other people being superstitious are not going to stand idly by and watch their way of life disappear. What will these people, the conmen who parasitise the gullible and vulnerable, the predatory priests who go into the priesthood to gain trusted access to children and other vulnerable people, the racists, misogynists, homophobes, flag-wrapped nationalist and scoundrel politicians, use if waving a Bible or Qur'an causes derision and contempt?

Maybe a glimpse of their panic can already be seen on Twitter and other social media where they are attempting mob rule and suppression having lost the rational argument to science and reason. We are certainly seeing regular whinging by right-wing nut-jobs who think Atheists should be stopped from making them think - If we're cracking down on Twitter abuse, can we include Richard Dawkins and the atheist trolls?

I would expect them to become increasingly shrill, desperate and violent. Don't get complacent. We have much still to do. The struggle is by no means won - yet.

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Twitter Under Attack for Permitting Abuse

Posted on 01:32 by Unknown

BBC News - Twitter 'report abuse' button calls after rape threats

BBC News - Twitter abuse case leads to arrest

It seems that Twitter may be becoming submerged in complaints of harassment and abuse, and of permitting this to continue as it becomes something of a safe haven for people with acute personality disorder to feel powerful in the safety of their bedroom.

At the moment the only weapon normal users have appears to be the ability to spam block offending individuals, which appears to trigger an automated algorithm not requiring human intervention, resulting in the account being suspended. In effect, policing Twitter is in the hands of the Twitter community whilst Twitter either can't, or won't defend their clients against inadequate and dysfunctional individuals whose only achievement in life is to get some attention, presumably working on the assumption that if they can tell themselves they've made someone elses life worse, this will somehow make theirs better.

The inadequacy of this method can be seen by the frequency with which it is used by those wishing to suppress free speech because they know their case is untenable. This is most often religious groups who are well aware that their public religiosity is merely a cover for otherwise unacceptable attitudes and actions and so will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent that being exposed.

Now combine this with, for example, a psychotic personality disorder in someone who has been frustrated in his ambition to gain trusted access to vulnerable people disguised as a priest, and you have a potent mixture for abuse which Twitter almost seems at times designed to facilitate.

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Sunday, 28 July 2013

Science Has Life After Death

Posted on 14:15 by Unknown

Stephen Hawking tells how doctors offered to turn off life support in 1985 | Science | guardian.co.uk

The news that doctors in Switzerland asked Stephen Hawking's then wife Jane to consider allowing them to turn off his life support when he was seriously ill with pneumonia in 1985, before he had completed his most famous book, A Brief History of Time set me thinking.

Apart from depriving us of one of the best-known popular physics books of all time and one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, what else would Stephen Hawking's death have cost humanity?

Hawking is quick to point out how, like Newton some 250 years earlier, if he could see farther than other men it was because he was 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Like Newton, Hawking's theories were developed out of discoveries made by earlier people. For example, the singularity theorems he developed with Roger Penrose were an application of Einstein's General Relativity, which was in turn a development of Galileo's relativity principle and the Michelson-Morley discovery of the constant speed of light. And how much more difficult would all this have been if Hindu scholars had not discovered zero as a mathematical concept and Islamic scholars had not developed algebra?

But do individuals affect the extent of human progress in the longer term?

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Winston Churchill

Science is a voyage of discovery. Methods and techniques can be invented, though a purist might say they are merely discovered, yet the facts which science discovers, and by which theories are either validated or proved false, already exist. No scientist ever invented a fact of nature.

Certainly the pace of progress of science can be affected by the occasional genius like Hawking or Einstein who make strides across the landscape and then wait for the rest to catch up, but the rest are still moving forward, (occasionally backwards and sometimes sideways or in circles) but the general progress is forward towards an ever closer understanding of the truth.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

The truth is out there waiting to be discovered. The whole history of science tells us this, as does the technology which applies these discoveries.

And that really is the great strength of science. It works even without the occasional giant strides of geniuses. Even the untimely death of one of our greats like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein would not have delayed our progress by more than a generation or two because there would still be giants on whose shoulders we can stand and the same truths would still have been there to be discovered.

You do not need to be a giant to stand on the shoulders of one.

One thing Stephen Hawking did give us though was a good laugh at the expense of desperate theists groping for something to apply their confirmation bias to. Referring to the hypothecated 'Grand Unified Theory' which will integrate Quantum Mechanics with Relativity, he ended the main section of A Brief History of Time with the paragraph:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God [My emphasis]

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time; 1988, p. 175

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

John F. Kennedy

This sent theological apologist quote miners into a feeding frenzy. You will still find them quoting it as 'proof' (how they love that word) that the 'cleverest man alive' believes in God. I remember thinking at the time, when someone (I forget who now) proclaimed A Brief History of Time as a 'profoundly religious book' - she had gone on to claim it vindicated her church of course - "Huh! What is she talking about? Has she really read it?". The answer was, of course, that, if she had read it and not just that final paragraph, she had read it to find just the vindication she craved. She had been looking for something to apply her confirmation bias too. She hadn't read it; she had trawled it.

Of course those of us who value truth and honesty recognised immediately that the 'God' Hawking was talking about was the God of Einstein and Spinoza - nature. It was almost certainly the god the 'Age of Reason' rationalists like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin would have believed in ,if only they had been able to stand on Darwin's shoulders. They couldn't, of course, because we had not progressed to that level of understanding for another eighty years. Instead, Darwin stood on their shoulders and so saw further that they could.

Had these eager quote miners been honest enough they would have read that paragraph in context. They only had to look to the previous page, the one which lies opposite their favourite one to find the clue to Hawking's meaning. He had said:

But if the universe is completely self-contained, with no singularity or boundaries, and completely described by a unified theory, that has profound implications for the role of God as a Creator.

Einstein once asked the question: "How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?" If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. he would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of GOD

... why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effects on the universe? And who created him? [My emphasis]

ibid; p 174

Heaven is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.

Stephen Hawking

It is quite clear to anyone that Hawking is pouring cold water on the notion of a creator god, even pointing out in that last sentence that the god hypothesis doesn't actually answer anything; it simply ducks the question by moving it back one. The ontological argument is one of the few 'theories' which not only fails to answer the question it is designed to answer but needs to be promptly abandoned as an argument the moment it is subject to cursory analysis, yet theologists find it compelling.

This says a great deal about theologist.

Later on, of course, having enjoyed the joke on theologists for twenty-two years, he made fools of them all with a few short sentences in The Grand Design where he simply said:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design; 2010, p. 180

Strangely, you never see those same religious apologists who rushed to proclaim that Stephen Hawking agrees with them now telling people how the 'cleverest man alive' says they are talking ignorant nonsense. Obviously, in religious apologetics, having your favourite argument utterly refuted does not mean it can't now be used anymore. If the audience will still swallow it the truth or falsity of the argument is an irrelevance. Religious apologists are not seekers after truth so much as seekers after money.

Contrast the progressive nature of science to that of religion. With science individuals, and individual geniuses can only affect the pace of progress but never it's ultimate direction, because it is a voyage of discovery and the truth it discovers exists just as much before we have discovered it as afterwards. We can be wrong, and frequently are and always allow for that possibility but the truth is true regardless.

Reason in no way contributes to faith. [...] For reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things.

Martin Luther

With religion, all the facts are pre-known and nothing need be done to discover or verify them. They all 'exist' by fiat with a complete disconnect from any real-world reality. They are there because someone a long time ago declared that they are. Those 'revealed' truths are sacred and must never be questioned. Indeed, to doubt or disbelieve them is to leave the 'faith'. With some faiths doubt or disbelief are terminal conditions. They would be with many others if only they could get away with it.

'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."

If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.

Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

Preface to Biology for Christian Schools,

William S. Pinkston, John A. Graham, Greg Kuzmic and Carla Vogt;

Bob Jones University Press

No amount of real-world evidence can have any relevance to religious 'facts' because they have been declared immune to reason. You are not permitted to stand on religion's giants shoulders in case you see their mistakes. All you can do is admire the view they claimed they could see. All the 'great' books of religion were written on their foundation and may never be revised; all the great books of science are yet to be written.

For this reason, whilst science always converges on a single answer regardless of the starting point because it always converges on the same pre-existing truth, religions always tend to diverge and fragment because there is no real truth for them to converge on and no mechanism for verifying it is permitted (or possible). The 'truths' that religions hold fast to are the 'truths' which their founders found it convenient for their followers to believe, like the 'truths' religious con-men, theologians and clerics find it convenient to sell to their hapless and gullible customers.

For this reason the fundamentalist religious purists all subscribe to a view of science which was held by the people who wrote their religious books and must never revise or update their knowledge when new information is discovered. Instead, those most admired are those most inventive in their ways to dismiss evidence. The moderates - those who find it hard to ignore scientific progress, often because they earn their living with it - must devise convoluted mental strategies for holding mutually contradictory views simultaneously and coping with the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance they experience.

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Saturday, 27 July 2013

You Really Won't Want To Miss This

Posted on 10:57 by Unknown

As most of you will know by now my Twitter account has been suspended. The reason why is shown here.

I've used a screen capture because otherwise Manuel will accuse me of making up emails like he does. As you can see, it had nothing to do with him, in any of his many guises. (See Manny's Many Twitter Accounts.) In fact, I appear to have triggered some algorithm, probably because I was replying to too many Creationist tweets in @TakeThatDarwin's timeline. They were just too tempting...

Sorry it's a little indistinct but the relevant passage reads: Your account was suspended because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules), specifically those rules around interacting with others by sending unsolicited or duplicate @replies or mentions. Double click to see it full size.

I'm flattered and humbled by the very many tweets protesting my suspension and the compliments paid to me. I'm also flattered by the many Creationists who have rushed forward to claim credit for it. I regard this as a mark of achievement and a sign that my campaign against lies and disinformation and for honesty and science is having an effect. Very clearly many people feel threatened by truth and wish to suppress it. None of their reasons can be honest or worthy of the slightest respect and seem to be all too typical of religious fundamentalists these days (are there any moderates left?).

Foremost amongst these has of course been Manuel. Had I requested Manuel to hold the fort for me and to continue to discredit religion in my absence, I could scarcely have expected him to perform half so well as he has. You now see why I refer to him as my unwitting assistant? No wonder the only accounts you ever see RTing his tweets are either his own, or Atheists wanting others to witness his idiocy.

Manuel? Surely you've heard of Manuel!

Manuel is Manuel de Dios Agosto, a 32 year-old former Catholic seminarian with what appears to be a narcissistic personality disorder, who was expelled from a seminary in New York because of his behaviour, at a time when the Catholic Church was embroiled in far too many other scandals to risk yet another. The Catholic newsletter announcing his admission to seminary when Manuel would have been about 18 was archived in 2003 and can be read here. Search for his name - about half-way down.

Just imagine, if he hadn't been caught he could now be a Catholic Priest with trusted access to vulnerable people!

I and Twitter user @Yhwh_TheLord exposed him as a fraud and liar a few months ago in Sacerdotus - The Fraud Exposed. All the credit for the meticulous research and writing it up as a report must go to @Yhwh_TheLord. I simply transcribed it to blog format complete with links. Since then, Manuel has been almost incandescent with rage, his cover having been blown, and his stalking and abuse exposed. His more abusive, sexually explicit and threatening accounts on Twitter have been permanently suspended or deleted.

My involvement with Manuel began last August when he had been confidently boasting that he had irrefutable scientific proof of the Christian god's existence which I challenged him to produce. Those unaware of this history can read the entire thing in my blog, How Christian Fundamentalists Lie To Us

Now Manuel seems to have convinced himself that he had something to do with the suspension of my Twitter account and has become positively hypermanic with joy. So much so that his normal bombing of my blog with attention-seeking spam and infantile gibberish has now reached a new high for volume and a new low for content. Normally the first thing I do when I log on each day is to delete all of his spam but he has exceeded even my low expectations of him in the last few days. I had assumed part of his personality disorder was a retarded emotional development which had ceased at about twelve years old. I've now revised that downwards to that of an eight year-old.

But there is no reason I should keep these to myself and not let others see how far Manuel has now deteriorated. I know many others have fallen foul of his infantile narcissism, so I offer a very small selection - the more savoury ones - for public enjoyment.

Sit back and enjoy watching 32 year-old Manuel de Dios Agosto, the narcissistic failed priest, in full prat mode, posting comments that he thought were going to be deleted unread and behaving with the emotional maturity of an eight year-old.

Wow my blog hits have dropped dramatically. Too bad I can't use twitter to spam and abuse people. LOL! HAHAHAHAHAHA

Help! I was suspended! LOL

Maybe I should become a Christian so God can protect me like He protects Sacerdotus.

That sacerdotus... grrrr. he's the only one who has defeated me. I used to squash creotards and now he has squashed me... grrrrr... No one could suspend me. God is truly with him! grrrr #%!?

Blimey! You are paranoid aren't you old bat!? :) It is important that you break away from that ghastly habit. It is not healthy.

Wow more atheists are disappearing from Twitter. How is your suspension going? You should know not to break the rules Rosie. #WON! LOL!

How are you Rosie? Is the #Sadloser sociopath atheist still raging at the world from his bedroom? Most likely the case I'm afraid.

Did you know an anagram of rosarubicondior is 'toad curses!' #witchcraft #satanism God put me in your path for a reason. You have to seek that reason.

Manuel unwittingly shows the world that he either doesn't know what an anagram is, or he has reading and spelling difficulties on top of all his other developmental problems.

And now the piece de resistance (to date)

Blimey Rosie! You really do think that is me don't you??? Wow, your excommunication from Twitter really got to you and is attacking further your already deteriorated mental health. I will pray for you. Don't you know I have used Skype to show who I really am to some of your friends? It's no wonder why they reported you as well to twitter. Atheists are indeed back stabbers. I also offered to Skype with you so we both can show each other our passports, but you ran away like a coward as usual. I can prove the information you wrote here is fiction with official US Federal documents. So let's try it. :-) Also, this does not help you in the case I'm building against you in the court. Moreover, your Atheist friends who are campaigning for your return are being reported to Twitter as well. DeepSearch17 and others have been wiped out already. More is to come. Those accounts who post your blog links are also being reported, just to let you know. Thankfully, the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, LGBT and even Atheist community is behind me in cleaning up Twitter from abusers like you. Anyhow, I made a memorial for you on my page. Come visit. We are remembering your passing from twitter. I Hope you can find inner peace in the Twitter afterlife and reconcile with God.

I particularly liked that one. Manuel has now gone full megalomaniac - from his bedroom - where he feels safe.

A couple from today's clutch of psychotic and megalomaniacal drivel:

Since you like calling me all kind of different names, call me David. You can call me David since I took you down with my stones. The underdog always wins. :) #WON #ForGrownUps

How's your new job taking care of the Royal's baby boy? :) #WON

Manuel now appears to believe he's controlling Twitter. His world-wide empire is expanding. It almost fills his bedroom now. This is one of today's batch of abusive comments he's posted on my blog.

Thanks to my efforts, Twitter is changing and enforcing its rules. Twitter was never meant to be a place where sociopaths abuse others by using anonymous pseudonyms.

Anonymous pseudonyms, eh? LOL! This from a sociopath with a long list of pseudonym Twitter accounts with which he abuses others anonymously. At least no one could ever accuse Manuel de Dios Agosto of not being a hypocrite.

I'll of course add more later so everyone can continue to enjoy the spectacle.

Well, well. No spam or infantile gibberish from Manuel today. Someone seems to have had a word in his shell-like. (Double-click to see it in its full glory).

Maybe that'll stop his abuse.

Well, maybe. When Manuel's accounts were all suspended last year, it took him about 6 weeks to pluck up the courage to start abusing people again. Might be worth quoting the the reference #119307092 if you're his next victim. Twitter must have quite a file by now, what with so many of his accounts being reported for spam and abuse.

And he never did accept my challenge to a civilised debate. I expect people can work out why.

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Winning With Science

Posted on 07:13 by Unknown

Belief in evolution up since 2004

The recent dramatic advance in the understanding of science and the corresponding rejection of primitive superstitions as an explanation for life on Earth across America was illustrated by a stunning YouGov poll published a few days ago. The last nine years between 2004 and 2013 when the poll was conducted has seen acceptance of the science of undirected, unguided Darwinian evolution as the explanation for human beings rise from just 13% to 21% - an increase of almost 1% per annum.

And it's even more of a shock for Creationists when we look at those figures more closely. Between 2004 and 2008 the increase was 0.5% per annum but this more than doubled to 1.2% per annum between 2008 and 2013. The rate of increase has doubled in just five years. This is beginning to look like the beginnings of an exponential growth phase where the rate of increase also increases steadily, just as we saw, and are still seeing in Europe.

This advance is against a backdrop of a very-well financed, increasingly shrill campaign of disinformation and downright lies conducted by the Discovery Institute and others as part of the 'Wedge Strategy'. The aim being to subvert the US Constitution and turn America into an extremist Taliban-style Old Testament theocracy with self-appointed fundamentalist Christian clerics forming all layers of government, complete with the death penalty for teaching 'false religions'. (See Why Creationists Lie To Us)

The belief that the best explanation is that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years - a fundamental concept of Christianity from which everything else about this remnant superstition of blood sacrifice to appease an angry and vengeful sky god stems - is now a minority view held by only 37% of Americans whilst belief in some form of Darwinian evolution is the majority view at 46%.

As the YouGov poll reports points out, the position for Creationists is likely to worsen in coming years because acceptance that there was no god involved in the evolution of mankind is highest, at 31% amongst the key 18-29 year-old group. This is the group that will be, in the main, producing the next generation. As we found in Europe, once it becomes socially acceptable to dismiss the role of gods the switch in attitudes and beliefs can be quite sudden. Many European countries have switched from devoutly Christian to predominantly Atheist in the last fifty years. America, it seems, is merely lagging behind in this process.

However, the poll was not a total disaster for the Discovery Institute despite them clearly losing the battle over superstition vs science. They appear to have had some success in their campaign to fool the American public into thinking 'Intelligent Design' is an alternative science and not just biblical creationism in disguise, with a majority of Americans believing it should be taught in public schools as an alternative scientific explanation. This is despite Supreme Court and Federal Court rulings that teaching Creationism in either form violates the 'Establishment Clause' and is thus in violation of the constitutional right to be free from government interference in matters of religion. (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1984 and Kitzmiller v. Dover District School Board, 2005.) Curiously, the religious right, which is normally shrill in its oposition to government involvement in anything, including the health and welfare of American citizens and protecting them against predatory corporations, has a diamerically opposite philosphy when it comes to religious freedom, which it believes should be imposed on Americans with the full weight of the law.

The main challenge now facing rationalists is how to get this view across to people at the lower end of the income and education scale, where primitive superstition is still the norm as the following tables show:

Education
	Less than high school	High school	Some college	College grad	Post grad
Undirected evolution	9%	14%	24%	32%	37%
God-guided evolution	29%	22%	23%	28%	33%
Created as is in last 10,000 years	41%	44%	39%	26%	16%
Not sure	21%	21%	14%	13%	13%

It's quite clear from this that belief in primitive superstition is inversely proportional to educational attainment. It is also clear from other work that the less educated a person is the more likely they are to come from the lower income groups which are, in turn, more likely to be members of the more fundamentalist Christian sects.

It is no surprise therefore to find people like Ken Ham, whose income depends on people remaining uneducated, have recently started teaching the unfortunate children of Creationists strategies designed to shut down any discussion which might lead to better understanding of science. (See Were You There?)

Ironically, in the USA, these lower income groups have been specifically targeted by the Christian political right who gave up victimising the under-classes when they achieved full political emancipation in the 1960s, and now seeks to keep them at the bottom of the social peck-order by keeping them under-educated and aspiration-free by selling them the notion that primitive Christianity is the only way they can have jam tomorrow - after they're dead, and it's too late to ask for a refund - provided they accept their inferior social position in this one and vote for the Christian fundamentalist. This is reinforced by the insidious notion that all scientists are either mad, evil or elitist, and probably all three, and that nothing science has to say on anything can possibly be anywhere near as reliable as the folk-tales of Bronze-Age middle-eastern goat-herders - and they'll burn in Hell if they don't buy it.

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