Richard Bennett plays rough. He also argues with impeccable and IMO irrefutable logic, and has clearly demolished the rather shallow arguments of the poster whom so many here are eager to defend. Frankly, I find refreshing his highbrowed, principled, you might say, Hitchensian, contrarianism.

In fact, the stakes in this matter are enormous, at least from my family’s point of view. I survived twelve years of Catholic schools; my wife survived seventeen years of Communist schools. We will not burden our children with such unreason and dogma as was pushed on us. Living in the Bible Belt and watching the advance of the know-nothing “creationists” is thus deeply troubling.

It’s also infuriating to think that such nonsense will take out yet more time from a science curriculum that is already ludicrously simplified and that lags far behind what students in Russia, India and much of East Asia are taught. The average Russian student is two-three years beyond elite US students in math and science matters; elite Russian students do what in this country is considered college-level math and science at the same age that our students are struggling to learn basic algebra.

The stupid and infantile approach to hard subjects taken by US schools is bad enough; that we now also have to worry about religious nonsense polluting those classes is appalling. And no, I don’t want lefty indoctrination, either. The absence of lefty idiocy does not compensate for the presence of fundamentalist religious idiocy. Ni Marx ni Jesus.