It's really a shame: the United States does have some very good things, like an excellent higher education system (which is declining with drooping support, but that's a different subject), a fine Constitution, and good pizza, but what is making headway in the rest of the world? McDonalds and creationism. Turkey has the creationism bug even worse than we do, and guess who infected them?
In the 1980s, Turkey was still reeling from a military coup d’etat. The socially conservative government that took control after the junta relinquished power changed the science curriculum in schools, Kence says. After the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case “Edwards v. Aguillard,” which prohibited the teaching of creationism in American public school science courses, he says creationists’ gaze moved abroad. Turkey came calling.
“In collaboration with American creationists, the Minister of Education in Turkey called the Institute for Creation Research and asked for their help,” he says. New textbooks were printed and distributed, and over time teachers began to teach creationism and evolution side by side.
A spokesperson at the Ministry of Education confirmed that government-sanctioned biology textbooks label evolution as a theory, as do scientists everywhere, but also teach creationism alongside it, as a rival theory.
It's pathetic and sad, too, when I look at the Turkish creationist literature, like Harun Yahya's junk: it isn't original or interesting or exotic, it really is exactly the same crap the ICR and similar evangelical creationist missionary outfits have been peddling since the 1960s. You can look at that ghastly Atlas of Creation that Yahya was mailing out to scientists everywhere and trace everything in it back to Duane Gish and Ron Wyatt and all the wacky Ark hunters who go off to Turkey to hike around Mt Ararat and spread gospel tracts.
The people who gravitate to creationism really are the bottom of the barrel, without a single original idea in their heads. And that seems to be true world-wide.
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To be fair, good pizza is making headway in the world, too.
I'm new to this blogging thing, so I haven't navigated this whole site. Maybe this question is covered elsewhere: If you assume there is no god(s) then how are we to explain the existence of the universe ? I mean where did all this energy and matter come from ?
for bobby g,
the existence of the universe came from the big bang, if your gonna ask what happened before that, we dont know, the universe could have been collapsing and expanding eternally, nobody knows, that doesnt mean we have to think up a magic sky daddy just because of our ignorance of all the facts.