[tsat home] [#43] [editorials]
What
Goes
There?
Torn From the Headlines
by Quentin 'Cubist' Long
©2005 Quentin Long -- all rights reserved

Ray Bradbury said it best: "We're living in a science fiction world."

You want examples? Okay; imagine a world in which a particular cult had once controlled all culture, politics and scholarship, everywhere. Imagine this cult's temporal power gradually dwindling, in part because of internal decay (i.e., schisms, etc) and in part because of external developments (i.e., the rise of political movements opposed to this religion, etc). Imagine a heretical cabal of this cult's final few adherents banding together for the sole purpose of restoring their cult to its former position of absolute dominance, and using every scrap of monetary and political power they can get their hands on to do just that.

Sounds like a novel Mack Reynolds, Robert A. Heinlein, or Frank Herbert could have written, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not. Rather, it's happening in the United States, right now and for the past several decades. What I'm referring to is so-called 'Scientific Creationism', a political movement whose constituency is wannabe-theocrats who abhor that pesky 'separation of Church and State' routine. This year's model of Scientific Creationism is an alleged 'scientific theory' called Intelligent Design, whose core axiom is "somehow, somewhere, somewhen, somebody intelligent did something". While ID's proponents do their best to conceal the fact that ID is nothing but fancied-up religious apologetics, since when does "somehow, somewhere, somewhen, somebody intelligent did something" pass muster as science?

But I digress.


[tsat home] [#43] [editorials]