90 Years Later…

A dear friend pointed out to me that today is the 90th anniversary of the start of the “Scopes Monkey Trial”.

Such a proud moment in American history. Not.

For those of you unfamiliar with the trial, I refer you to the Wikipedia article here.

The important thing to note is that the church and religion won. Creation was the right thing to teach in schools and Evolution was “bad”.

This was 1925.

90 years later….

The debate still rages on, in spite of educators in general having moved on from teaching creation and focusing on science.

Educators and historians look back on the Scopes trial now and think “were we really so misguided?” While religious folk try to take us back and say “maybe they had it right, we need to teach creation!”

Why are we still so divided after all these decades? And in many ways even more divided than we were just 20 years ago?

I don’t get it, honestly. Why do we have to have this fictional war between science and the Bible? Or rather, a handful of people’s interpretation of the Bible as “literal”? Why are we so intent on going backward in our understanding instead of accepting that science is not in conflict with faith?

Science has done so much for mankind since the Scopes trial. The keys I’m typing on are attached to more technology than I can understand and will allow me to send these words out to the world in just a few seconds after I finish typing them. But more than that, advances in medicine and the treatment of diseases like cancer and diabetes and many other life saving and life changing discoveries come directly from our study and understanding of how all living things are related. To deny that would be to move us so far back as to take the human race to the edge of disaster.

We’re better than this. We’re better than we were 90 years ago, or so I thought.

If we are to move ahead, we need to move on. We need to give up on having our way, give up on twisting reality to fit into figurative narratives. Close the Creation museums, quit dumbing down our children (and adults too), and let people use their brains. MAKE them use their brains instead of being spoon fed a bunch of crap.