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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

300 million people believing in creationism is far less harmful than 1 person dropping bombs at a marathon.

i believe in evolution, but you need to get over the idea there is some kind of innate golden age waiting to happen if only those annoying chiristains would believe in evolution.

unless you are a biologist, believing in creationism has no impact on your life or how you do your job. i dont care if my brain surgeon believes in creationism. you know what i care about? how well they do brain surgery.

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I'd argue that creationism is more dangerous, because it instills a general distrust in science. This leads to leaders who can openly claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Global warming will most likely kill several orders of magnitude more people than all Islamic terrorists taken together.

One can trust science, but not scientists as if they're some special beings above corruption and what else.

> 300 million people believing in creationism is far less harmful than 1 person dropping bombs at a marathon.

How many bombs have been dropped on other countries because of the choices of those millions of uneducated voters?

Are you talking about the Obama administration? Probably not, since what progressive folks usually mean by ignorant voters is "people that vote different from me, you know, those rednecks over there".

Is moving goalposts your only argumentative tactic?

>300 million people believing in creationism is far less harmful than 1 person dropping bombs at a marathon.

Could you elaborate? You state this like it's obvious, but it isn't (at least to me).

Evolution was just an example to illustrate how far religious superstition reaches.

Disbelief in science in general has a massive impact - causing deaths.

Even disbelief in evolution causes deaths, e.g. if we don't do enough to deal with antibiotic resistance.

> Even disbelief in evolution causes deaths, e.g. if we don't do enough to deal with antibiotic resistance.

I wonder if this is true? What is correlation of Americans who "don't believe in evolution" who would reject the notion of antibiotic resistance in infectious diseases if you explained it to them? I wonder how many would reject the notions of husbandry, e.g. if you continually breed for a certain trait, like agreeableness, that the offspring will be on average more agreeable than the previous generation.

There is the religion of Christian Science, which rejects taking all medicine, but even there, that would only seem to be beneficial in antibiotic preservation practices.

This is what is meant by a cult of ignorance. They want to insist that the only purpose of knowledge is to fulfill one's practical economic role.

but then why this fixation on Islam and not on the heroin epidemic or mass shootings?

Easier to deal with a "them vs us" than an "us vs some of us"

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