What we are up against: Ignorance + Religious Belief: Science (facts) vs Religion

No matter how good our politicians are, no matter how "right" they are or how charismatic, we have a huge barrier in our way: Ignorance + Religious Belief.  In the metro section of today's NYTimes, there is an article on a large exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History, focused on Darwin: his ideas and his life. In the course of reading about the exhibit I found the following humdinger of a sentence, "According to a CBS News poll last month, 51 percent of Americans reject (emphasis mine) the theory of evolution,

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saying that God created humans in their present form. And reflecting a longstanding sentiment, 38 percent of Americans believe that creationism should be taught instead (again emphasis mine) of evolution......".

Now if this is really the case, then the problems we have are more serious and less amenable to reason than i had thought and assumed. If such a large percentage of our citizens are this ignorant (note the wording pls, I did NOT say stupid), we have horrendous hurdles to go over.

It means that evidence, facts, and other concepts we all use in "proving" and "arguing" our points, are thought of as no more valuable than "the moon is made of green cheese".

This is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time.

here is the link:http://www.nytimes.com/...