I had a conversation with God today. I'm sure of it. Just as sure, at least, as so many other prophets, gurus, masters, and other purported communicators with the divine have been.
In my case, a godly voice didn't come out of a burning bush. It was more intimate than that: God spoke to me from right inside my own head, which makes it difficult for me to doubt a divine encounter that was so direct.
Below you'll learn what God commanded me to preach.
Be warned, God has a foul mouth. He doesn't mince words when he's seriously pissed. And believe me, He is. Given his omniscience, God was right on top of yesterday's Gallup poll news release.
PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.
...The Most Religious Americans Are Most Likely to Be Creationists
Gallup's question wording explicitly frames the three alternatives in terms of God's involvement in the process of human development, making it less than surprising to find that the more religious the American, the more likely he or she is to choose the creationist viewpoint.
...Two-thirds of Americans who attend religious services weekly choose the creationist alternative, compared with 25% of those who say they seldom or never attend church. The views of Americans who attend almost every week or monthly fall in between those of the other two groups. Still, those who seldom or never attend church are more likely to believe that God guided the evolutionary process than to believe that humans evolved with no input from God.
Time to tell you what God thinks about this. Here's what God told me, verbatim.
You fucking religious idiots! You're going to hell. Count on it! Sins I can forgive; willful idiocy, no way. And the disrespect... outrageous. I went to a goddamn lot of trouble to leave you with enough smarts to figure out what the cosmos is all about.
And now a freaking two-thirds of the bozos who attend religious services weekly say, to hell with the knowledge God has given us, we believe in a made-up story book. Unbelievable. The Bible is chock full of bullshit, which you assholes suck like candy, while you ignore the obvious evidence I left for you.
Hello! Heaven to Earth... is anybody religious listening? Are only my dearly beloved scientists paying attention to my reality?
The Big Bang. Galaxy formation. Supernovas. Life arising on Earth. Evolution. For fourteen billion years I've been waiting for intelligent beings to pop up in your universe who could get a glimpse into how their popping-up happened.
I was looking forward to listening in on more expressions of wonder than I'm getting from religious Americans. Instead of Wow, so that's how God's cosmos is put together! I'm hearing I believe in the Bible, so God created humans just as they are today in the past 10,000 years.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Super fucking wrong!
So wrong, I'm going to enjoy putting every idiot who chooses the fantasy of creationism over the facts of the cosmos into Scientific Hell after they die. Maybe listening to the same lecture about evolution over and over non-stop for a couple of billion years will drive some sense into their God-empty religious consciousnesses.
And don't get me started about other head-in-the-sand stuff that makes me just as mad. Global warming and species extinctions for example. Hey, humans, you're supposed to take care of the Earth you're on, not trash it!
I'm glad I decided to have a cosmos with a multiverse, which the scientifically savvy among you are starting to see some clues about. There's plenty of other places where intelligence has evolved to understand facts clearly.
Hopefully those deeply religious asswipes on your planet will see God's light eventually. Thanks for listening to my rant, Brian. I've chosen you to pass on my words through your blog. Appreciate it.
The churchless are my favorite humans. They aren't blinded by religious crap which smears up their vision of my cosmos.
So there you are. A message from God. Believe it. Along with unguided evolution over hundreds of millions of years.
If the Gallup poll creationist trendline doesn't start changing in a more scientific direction soon, God is going to get even more pissed off.
Implications
Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans' views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.
More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.
All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.
Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.
Blogger Brian - somehow, it seems as though you are dissatisfied with the ostensible fact that science does not have the wherewithal to displace the ancient rationalizations which pervade the human psyche.
What advantage is there to believing that humans evolved over enormous stretches of time as opposed to a separate supernatural being deliberately calling into existence a first human being, complete with all common features? I suppose that it then becomes easier to justify the huge catalog of anomalies, rather than declaring the creator to be an ignoramus, and a cruel one at that!
"Believers" in a separate "God" who created human beings for a distinct purpose cannot be convinced otherwise. There is no point in trying to change them. They go about their lives in pretty much the same way as everyone else, their only social faux pas being their propensity for boorishness. We godless folk arrange our lives so as to eschew contact with them to the extent possible.
Posted by: Willie R | June 03, 2012 at 04:57 AM
Although only tangentially related to this topic, I (again) call attention to the excellence of Zinnia Jones' recent exercise of reason on a kindred topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1joF39ozGm4&list=UUamaea05bOJ0q42F9iyaFMA&index=2&feature=plcp .
Robert Paul Howard
Posted by: Robert Paul Howard | June 12, 2012 at 03:11 PM