Yes­ter­day, after vis­it­ing the video store and cook­ing some­thing for my long awaited Fri­day even­ing meal, I decided to not watch the movie I fetched. It actu­ally was a quite too odd film, so I decided to zap a bit. After watch­ing com­edy series here, some doc­u­ment­ar­ies there, I sud­denly stopped. Phoenix, a highly regarded Ger­man news chan­nel, screened a doc­u­ment­ary on Intel­li­gent Design. Yes, about cre­ation­ists, their the­ory, and their tricks. I was aston­ished, puzzled, and afraid. For me it always was mostly an Amer­ican prob­lem but it seems that fun­da­ment­al­ists are spread all over the world.

Cre­ation­ists and sci­ent­ists were inter­viewed. I can’t believe that there are people want to rean­im­ate the dark ages!? Reli­gion and polit­ics, reli­gion and sci­ence must not be mixed up. Teach­ing chil­dren sci­en­tific­ally unproven the­or­ies in school is unac­cept­able! Let­ting teach­ers tell pupils in bio­logy or some other sci­entific class things about the earth being some­thing between 6000 and 20000 years old, or stor­ies about some meta-person that has designed and cre­ated the earth in a few days or years is crim­inal in my opin­ion! Even worse, this dis­crim­in­ates other reli­gions because hints towards the one Chris­tian god are obvious.

The main prob­lem here is that chil­dren are always taught to believe adults and espe­cially teach­ers. Let­ting teach­ers teach their pupils their per­sonal view is abuse of duty! Chil­dren should not be taught what to believe but decide by their own. In sci­ence it is okay and wel­comed to review other the­or­ies as well, but only sci­entific the­or­ies. Cre­ation­ism is no sci­entific the­ory, it is a reli­gious one. It still is, and will remain, a theory–a wrong one in my opinion!

The best scene in the whole doc­u­ment­ary was the inter­view with an Aus­trian arch­bishop, the one of Vienna, I think. He adjudged the Intel­li­gent Design move­ment and the Cre­ation­ists as being kind of stu­pid. They should not have mixed up reli­gion with sci­ence, this was wrong, he said. The cath­olic church as a whole does not sup­port this move­ment in any way!

Reli­gion is okay, as long as I do not have to believe some­thing that I per­son­ally refuse. Fun­da­ment­al­ists are a thread for man, inde­pend­ent of their religion!