I’m sorry… this is just depressing. Some aspects of this Reuters poll are not surprising. Vast majorities of Americans believe in God and Jesus as either God or the Son of God. That’s all well and good. But for only 42% to believe in evolution is a bit numbing. Only 16% of Evangelicals accept evolution, which I guess shouldn’t come as a shock. But I wonder if that same 84% of them would be willing to live without the medicines, therapies, crops, and livestock that scientists, working with and from Darwin’s theory, have made available to them? Maybe the witches that 37% of them believe in can conjure something up for them the next time they are sick or hungry.

Beer is apparently a much more dangerous beverage than I was previously aware.

From Florida, we have a report of a man who was seriously injured when a beer can fell on him. It must have been quite a sizable can as even his wife reports in the suit that she “has in the past and will in the future suffer the loss of the value of her husband’s services, society, companionship and consortium by reason of his injuries.” One would think she was more likely to suffer those things had he successfully purchased the Schlitz Malt Liquor, but this is a court document so it must be true. The lesson here is clearly to never buy 4-packs or other small packages of beer. They store those high on the shelf. Whereas cases are always on the floor, hence being much less prone to falling on you.

But if hurting yourself wasn’t bad enough, there’s also a report citing that beer drinkers are destroying the planet. It seems that “beer fridges” are being identified as the SUVs of the appliance world. I’m doing my part though to reduce the carbon footprint of my vices. There’s no beer fridge here… unless you count the one in the kitchen… but I keep mustard and bologna and other essentials in there too, so that doesn’t qualify, does it?

Not that I expected the Pope to support atheism, but I did expect him to be more enlightened than to blame it for all the atrocities of the Marxist regimes of history. This seems a common misconception, that somehow Stalin would have been less of a lunatic if only he had found God. And the logic seems to go further to equate atheism and atheists with cruelty and inhumanity. That’s a logical fallacy. Just because a Methodist robs a liquor store, doesn’t make all Methodists thieves. Nor does it make the church somehow responsible for inciting the crime.

There are two important points to consider. One, many more atrocities have been committed in the name of a god than by atheists. The Crusades, the Holocaust, and the more recent wave of Islamo-terrorism to name just a few. Did religion make Saddam Hussein kinder and gentler? These events are never pegged at theism’s doorstep though. They are the work of individuals using religion as a tool to control the people who would carry out their heinous will. Which brings us to point two: control. Religion can be used as a control mechanism by unscrupulous leaders. That isn’t the value of religion, but it can be used to that end. This is the precise reason atheism is a tenet of Marxism. Marxists don’t want another social vector vying for control of the hearts and minds of the masses.

Politically enforced atheism is just as dangerous as politically enforced theism. In both cases social vectors are minimized, which allows the population to be manipulated as a more cohesive whole. But this doesn’t make either atheists or theists inherently dangerous.

The Pope has pretty obvious reasons for discouraging atheism. I’m fine with that. I’m all for him enticing all the atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Druids, or Wiccans he can into his flock. But there’s no reason to demonize us.