So it seems that not all the creationist idiots in the world are confined to Kansas or Alabama. Romania has just done something incredibly stupid. I guess they’re in a mad hurry to live up to Stoker’s dramatization of Transylvanians as barbaric, mindless peasants, obsessed with religious symbolism. To quote Elizabeth Miller:
Its inhabitants are still depicted as backward peasants who hold fast to their primitive and superstitious past, who still hang garlic on their windows to keep vampires away, and who would never venture out at night without a crucifix in hand.
Why this vitriol against the bumpinks of the Carpathian? Well, they’ve just banned the teaching of evolution from the national curriculum, opting for a more “balanced” worldview, which of course, consists of liberal doses of balderdash from everyone’s favourite sci-fi/fantasy novel: the Bible.
Some choice excerpts from the news article:
Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children’s understanding of how the world came into being.
Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.
Followed by
Meanwhile, in religious classes, pupils are taught that the world was created in seven days and God made plants on the third day and the sun on the fourth. Textbooks claim the first man was Adam, who was ‘made of ground’, and that Eve, the first woman, was made from one of her husband’s ribs.
“The Romanian state, whether it intends or not, offers pupils a unique perspective on the world, the religious one, without any critical scientific or philosophical offset,” argues Cernea.
And finally, one benefit of being a religious person, sleeping in on Sundays:
At present, children are taught religious classes from ages seven to 18. This is mostly an Orthodox curriculum. They are also taught that to sleep in on Sunday mornings is bad because children should be going to church.
And why is this not surprising at all?
But there are new proposals to make all religious classes compulsory for the education system, regardless of the parents’ wishes.
I can just see all the other fundamentalists living in other, saner secular societies nodding their heads and wishing their countries were more like Romania. “We need to be more like that”, they whisper to each other, “this liberal, atheist, gay, heathen, multicultural, leftist, feminist, 9/11, UFO, non WASP, Zionist, Manson-family, Commie agenda leaves no place for rational people like us”. Suckers!
Here’s the source.
Next target, Chemistry!
Don’t laugh. In a country stupid enough to allow this, you never know what’s coming. Then again, ridicule is a powerful weapon, so disdain away.