Bogosity

I only posted this today because I liked the cartoon. Nothing new here really.

Evolution vs. Creationism :: Intervention Magazine :: War, Politics, Culture

In the mid-eighteenth century, a popularly held religious belief was that lightning was God’s retribution for our sins. Then Benjamin Franklin and his son conducted a simple yet courageous experiment involving flying a kite in a thunderstorm. Their experiment showed that lightning forming in the clouds behaves just like electrical discharges from a Leyden jar in a laboratory. Then Franklin earned a fairly good income from selling lightning rods for Philadelphia houses and selling fire insurance to the homeowners.

Church leaders vigorously condemned lightning rods and Franklin’s electrical theory as blasphemy. But as more people and businesses bought lightning rods (soon churches also had them), religious fundamentalists moved on.

Today in America, fundamentalist Christians no longer rail against the lightning rod. They’ve shifted their attention to condemning Charles Darwin’s historic 19th century writings on the “ascent of man,” and also to condemning today’s modern concept of evolution based on well-established genetic and molecular biological experiments.