Taking Candy From Babies

Just when I get sad about how the Theocons are trying to destroy America they do something that makes me laugh. It's partly so I don't cry, but it still gives me the chuckles.

In today's Washington Post, there is an article about how a Texas public school is going to start a Bible study course. I'll spare you the outrage or observations about the 1st Amendment, since they are self-evident and you'll get plenty of them from other bloggers. Instead I'm going to focus on one line that made me giggle:

In one teaching unit, students are told, "Throughout most of the last 2,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western world have accepted the statements of the Scriptures as genuine."

This statement is a combination of 2 different sorts of of fallacies: appeal to common belief and appeal to tradition. These are two of the most amusing fallacies. You see, there are about 7000 years of recorded history in "Western Civilization," so we can come up with a lot of other wonderful things we should be doing based on this line of "reasoning".....

For 6,950 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have accepted the subordinate status of women

For 6,850 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have accepted the legitimacy of slavery

For 6,500 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have denied the existence of the Western Hemisphere

For 5,000 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have accepted the practice of infanticide

For 6,500 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have believed that the earth was the center of the universe

For 5,700 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have been pagans.

For 6,800 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western World have rejected democracy in favor of absolute monarchy

And my personal favorite, for 7,000 of the last 7,000 years, the majority of men living in the entire World have not been christians.

So according to the Theocons, we should all be misogynistic, slave-holding, geographically ignorant, baby-killing, scientifically wrong-headed, authoritarian, polytheistic non-christians.

But then we already knew that, didn't we?