Evolution Too Controversial for America …Seriously?

Creation, a British film that opened the Toronto Film Festival this year, has been receiving great reviews and finding distributors across the globe... almost everywhere! Just not America - because US distributors are afraid it might offend people or be divisive.

I actually am astonished by this statistic, but according to a poll done in February of this year, only 39% of Americans believe in Evolution.

THIRTY NINE PERCENT.

That means that a majority of people either don't know what they believe, OR, believe in Creationism (ie: humans and dinosaurs coexisted peacefully and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark... things of that nature). I don't think I'd even HEARD of the idea of Intelligent Design or Creationism until I was out of college and heard about court cases in other states where they were trying to teach these ideas as SCIENCE. Maybe it's to do with where I live, but damn.

Look, I think people believe what they want to believe and they have every right to do so, BUT believe it and teach it in institutions where it is appropriate. I learned about Adam and Eve in Hebrew school. I learned about Evolution in public school, and never the two did meet. To me, one was science and one was religious mythology, taught to us to keep the topic interesting, but completely unrealistic in scientific thought. There was a very good reason behind the separation between church and state, religion and science. One has NOTHING to do with the other - in a country such as ours, you cannot govern based on religion and you cannot educate, in a public school, based on religious belief. If those poll numbers are accurate, it's really just disturbing - it's on the same scale as teaching only abstinence and not educating about safe sex. It's breeding ignorance.

On the topic of the movie issue - it seems utterly ridiculous that this sort of film would be viewed as offensive or divisive, while Hollywood still manages to have distributors for whatever vulgar comedies come along, documentaries that slander all sorts of politicians, and crime dramas about snuff films. Surely there are more divisive things streaming across our airways - Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly still have jobs, don't they?