Seriously. Bush and his buddies have ZERO reason to kill off Bin Laden and his Pakistani suicide buddies. They preach the same crap, and when UBL blows something up, people rally around Bush's science hating regime. If you watched the hearings of the surgeon general's, this kind of anti science behavior goes all the way to the top.

that the earth is flat and or was created in an single 168 hour interval 6,000 years ago. They are socially conservative, to say the least. But they're not fools.

Somebody's taken it down. For good or ill, I'm glad either way.

The entire Pakistani jihadi force was the creation of the Pakistani army and the military dictatorship under General Zia. And now, with the growing anger in the country against Pres. Musharraf, more people seem to be turning towards the fundamentalists. Jamaat and the other fundamentalist parties have been growing more popular. Say what you will about the corrupt civilian governments, at least, the religious nuts were not this powerful within Pakistan under them.

So when will the US push for a return to democracy for Pakistan? Never, I guess. The way things are moving there, what if Jamaat and the other fundies won the election? Pakistan has the bomb, after all.

"In addition, the New Testament states clearly that Adam and Eve were our original parents and that Noah's Flood was an historical reality".

It would be interesting to challenge the author of this ridiculous screed to produce these statements in the New Testament. They are not in any version that I am aware of.

In general, it is remarkable how little these fundamentalists actually know about the text of the Bible.

BTJ writes:

In general, it is remarkable how little these fundamentalists actually know about the text of the Bible.

Indeed it is! Suprisingly few fundamentalists have slaves, or send their daughters to live outside the camp at "that time" of the month, even though the Bible is very clear on their right to do the first and their duty to do the latter.

Slightly less remarkable, considering their antipathy to it, is how little these fundamentalists actually know about the science they are deriding. From the letter:

Many scientists today have denounced Darwinian theories as bogus science. Yet the EBIO department upholds it as the Gospel truth and hides itself in a false cloak of intellectual arrogance.

To be clear, no scientist, anywhere, "denounces". If they have better data, a better theory, they publish. Creationism's published theory -- ID -- has been conclusively debunked. Not so Darwin's natural selection, which despite the objections of the god-botherers continues to predict and explain new data every day. And no scientist, anywhere, upholds anything at all as the "Gospel" truth. Scientists can certainly be intellectually arrogant, but this can't be used to "cloak" anything. If you want to say something in science, you say it publically and invite every other scientist to pick it apart as best they can.

Which brings us full circle to government policy. At the highest levels of government, we need far less "I'm implementing my vision regardless" and far more "Here's my best plan, now what problems do you see with that?"

Amusing how closely the former conforms to the religious world-view and how closely the latter conforms to the scientific method...

"....denies a Creator God and claims that life evolved from inanimate matter without Divine Direction, Oversight, or Providence."

Actually one of the really interesting things under examination by the Anthropic Principle folks and many other good science people is ....

WHY might a bunch of 'inanimate' chemicals shaped like a double helix WANT either to replicate or propagate?

[may have to do with substrate~catalyst interactions, but still leaves one with some 'Systems Thinking' and maybe even something called 'Providence'.]

Insult to injury -- we now know that prions make more twisty proteins like themselves in hosts other than the one originally producing the sick little strand.

Fun stuff.

Putting "In God We Trust" on our money and "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance were very bad ideas. I can understand the religious right's confusion - how can we have a secular government some of the time and yet endorse their religion on our currency and in our national pledge? By introducing "God" into our government in seemingly subtle ways, we've blurred the line between religion and politics, which is exactly what the founding fathers didn't want us to do. We need to demarcate the lines more effectively. Unfortunately, once you've given a group a privilege, it's very hard to take it back. With the fundamentalists pushing from one side, and the rest of us bending over backwards to not offend them on the other, I don't see any changes soon. Well, not any good ones, anyway. But we'd better start pushing back soon... unless we like the idea of living in a theocracy. Personally, a fundamentalist Christian nation doesn't sound any better to me than a fundamentalist Muslin one does.

Christian Nationalists/Reconstructionists scare the hell out of me. I helped take them on here in Kansas where they demanded equal time (as a first step) for their nonsensical "theories" in public schools. (And I did very well, thank you.) They are set to deliberately destroy public education through vouchers, charter schools, so that the working class will pay for the children of the greedy rich at prep schools and those of the deluded at Christan madrassas while K-12 withers. An unholy alliance, if ever there was one.

I also visited the Creation Museum a few weeks ago, in Kentucky. It was almost scary, being overwhelmed by hundreds of "true believers" soaking up cleverly presented though complete nonsense as if it were actually science. The owners of this $27 million dollar bemusement park claim to be Biblical literalists.

I took a trip to the cafeteria that Sunday morning. They had pork dishes with Biblical names on the menu? Over a hundred and fifty DVDs presennting their pseudoscience. Wait a minute! Moneychangers in the temple? Working on the Sabbath? Eating hog? What about Leviticus, Deuterony, Exodus and the New Testament?

Waaahhhhh!