by Justin Scott, founder and director of the Eastern Iowa Atheists
This weekend, my wife, kids and I loaded up and hit up my hometown fair. It's become a tradition of sorts to hit it up at least once each year since we still live fairly close and as the kids continue to grow, they are starting to appreciate the fun that fairs offer. (Believe it or not I do take moments away from atheist activism to enjoy the simple things in life. Or at least I tried this weekend as you'll find out from this story...)
So we arrive to the fairgrounds and start doing what any typical family with three small children do: we hit up some rides, we complained about the heat and tried to survive the requests for potty breaks that seemed to come every five minutes. The potty break that sets this story in motion comes compliments of our oldest. Him and I make our way to the main building on the fairgrounds, an air conditioned pavilion that is popular for events like wedding receptions.
I guide him to the bathroom and since he's a "big kid," I no longer have to help him out so I stand outside the bathroom where I notice a display on German Iowans. As a history nerd, it sucks me in. I take a few seconds to glance at the headers to get a feel for what the display is about. Before I know it my son finishes his business and joins me. Realizing that we need to meet back up with my wife, other kids and some other family for lunch, I begin to snap a few photos of the display so that I can read it later.
There's a group of teen girls standing in front of one of the final displays so I politely ask them to take a step over so I an get a photo. They happily oblige. It's in that moment that I notice that one of them is rocking a Ben Carson for President t-shirt. It catches me off guard. It's been more than a year since the Iowa Caucus and well over a year since he dropped out. Also, in these parts, you never see any teens wearing political attire and if you do it's some distraught Bernie supporter still wailing about HRC and the DNC (and rightfully so) or some asshole Trump supporter trying to stick his win and subsequent presidency down your throat (MERIKA!).
I immediately think back to the one and only time I challenged Mr. Carson in person and how idiotic I thought his responses were to my questions. Not only that, but knowing that a lot of his worldviews as it pertained to how he would lead our country was based in his religious beliefs makes my stomach turn when I think about him. I really wanted to know at this point: Is this teen wearing his shirt because she supports him or his stances on things or is she wearing it ironically to look hip?
I toss out "Wow, Ben Carson, really?!" with a smirk.
Without hesitation she replies with an enthusiastic "Yes!"
It was at that moment painfully obvious that she's an ardent supporter of his, or at least "was" an ardent supporter while he was running.
I want to learn more so I snap a photo of the final display and then lean over and quip "You realize he believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, right?"
The question was less about Mr. Carson's religious beliefs--although I think they're batshit crazy--it was more about hoping that since she was a young millennial, someone that has had the world at her fingertips that has had the opportunity to use the internet since birth to debunk any bogus claim to come her way, that she perhaps hadn't heard that about him and would be caught off guard by this nugget.
Nope.
"I do too! It says so in the Bible!" she responds.
Wow. Just wow.
I'm completely dumbfounded. Now obviously all of this happened in a matter of a few seconds but it felt like an eternity as I sat there trying to process what was happening. Here you have an otherwise very intelligent teen that I assumed grew up in the same community that I did, buying into the religious delusion that our Earth isn't a few billion years old but merely 6,000 years old despite growing up with access to all of the information humanity has ever accumulated at her fingertips.
What went wrong? I wondered.
How did she get so led astray from reason, critical thinking and science?
So I asked her.
"So you're telling me that you choose to believe in a 6,000 year old Earth because some archaic collection of stories from the Middle East tell you over what science has discovered?"
"Science is fake news!" she arrogantly proclaims with a smirk.
WHAT.
THE.
FUCK?!
Now obviously I didn't say this to her but this was the first and only thing that I thought of when I heard her say that to me. This was also the first time her voice had raised and I could tell that she was ready for this discussion.
As much as I really want to get into a long, drawn out discussion with her, this is where the "bottom" completely fell out of this conversation for me. This was the moment where I realized that her delusion wasn't something that she wears on the surface to "fit in" at her church. This is a deeply ingrained delusion that has been planted there since as long as she could probably understand the words her parents were telling her. It's not that I was giving up or retreating, it was that I knew that it as going to take more than a quick run-in at a county fair to try and reverse years of religious coercion that she had experienced.
This was a disgusting display of the dangers of childhood indoctrination in my humble opinion. It was proof of what happens when you take a young, innocent and impressionable mind and cram it full of, as Seth Andrews of the Thinking Atheist says, "religious woo".
It was another reminder to me, as a parent of three young children, to begin focusing on demonstrating critical thinking skills, teaching them how to reason through statements that they are told and how to understand the difference between evidence based theories and deeply held beliefs. Childhood indoctrination is one of the worst forms of child abuse out there in my opinion. I won't do it to my kids and sure as hell don't want others to do it to their kids. Look at what it does wit the unfortunate spawn of Westboro Baptist Church members if you think indoctrination "isn't that bad".
My final effort to better understand this poor, misguided young woman was to ask if she was homeschooled. Perhaps this was based on a bad stereotype of all homeschooled children being raised as fundamentalist Christians but I at least wanted to try to wrap my head around how she came to this point. To my surprise but later disgust, she said she wasn't.
This tells me that either, her upbringing was so fundamentalist, so religiously conservative, that she entered public school with the foundation of creationism already laid down. Imagine all of the things that her teachers tried teaching her that she was probably later told to ignore. Imagine all of the things she's yet to learn that will undoubtedly rock her very understanding of the world around her. It's fair to say that you don't run into too many young Earth creationists in Eastern Iowa. She's my first that I've ever ran into in Iowa and I've lived here for 35 years now. The only other set of creationists I've ever met from Eastern Iowa I met after the Ark Encounter protest in Kentucky last year. That was wild.
So after all of this, I'm left with more questions than answers. How do we as a society, one that as I mentioned above have access to an almost never ending supply of information at our fingertips, allow this to happen? How do we allow our children and other children to be subjected to the mind rape that is childhood religious indoctrination? How do we sit back and watch our kids' friends be coerced into believing this nonsense? Is it because we never think to ask our kids' friends what they believe or what they've been taught? Is it that we find it to be rude to ask about "deeply held beliefs"? Is it that we've grown up in a society that thinks being respectful to bad ideas is the same as being respectful to the person with the bad ideas? Did no parent or teacher ever stop this young woman along the way and challenge her deeply held beliefs when they conflicted with what reason and science has demonstrated?
I don't know. I just don't have the answers.
A friend of mine and EIA member recently shared with me that when she began a college biology class, she remembers the professor taking a moment to put out a disclaimer that evolution is real and accepted by the scientific community, and that creationism is not and would not promoted or accepted as science in that class. The friend shared how completely caught off guard she was by the whole experience, noting how the student proceeded to be blown away at all of the scientific basics that she assumed everyone knew. It reminded me of an experience that I had in college.
In 2010 I went back to school as a non-traditional student to pursue a degree in Professional Photography from Hawkeye College in Waterloo, Iowa, one of the premiere photography colleges in the country. (I'm a very proud graduate and have been saying that since long before I was ever a student there so don't think for a second that I was paid to say that for them! Haha!)
My first year class was in a color theory class when my professor made it clear he had no time for creationism in his classroom. As he began to talk about where color comes from and how the human brain perceives color he paused to make a statement about how he had ZERO interest in debating the origin of mankind, the age of the Earth or Cosmos. Right away a young woman in front of me from Wisconsin "showed her cards" as someone that accepts the creation story at least by putting her head down on her desk and shaking it back and forth in creationist disgust. She made it apparent that her deeply held beliefs object to science and reason. I'm so happy looking back to know that one of my favorite professors was taking a stand against religious bullshit in his classroom.
Back to the experience I had with the young Earth creationist teen, having now connected it to the experience in college, it makes me wonder if the reports of the United States entering the age of Idiocracy are true. When did anti-intellectualism become sexy? Or a virtue, something to boast proudly about? When was being arrogant about your religious ignorance seen as being some kind of patriot for your deeply held beliefs?
It's up to you and I to stop this nonsense. It's up to you and I to challenge this every time we have the opportunity. Hear a wisecrack about evolution, RESPOND. Hear someone tell a child that something happened because of God, RESPOND. Notice that someone is wearing a Ben Carson for President, RESPOND.
You don't have to be a dick about it. I stand by my exchange with this creationist as a respectful exchange about a difference in worldviews; one based on evidence and the other on delusion. There were no insults. She would probably agree that it was just a fun conversation with a random dad she ran into at fair, despite the fact that we completely disagreed with one another.
I'm hoping that our brief encounter with this teen creationist will become a "memory marble" for her (any Inside Out fans out there?), one that begins to sew the seeds of doubt that will hopefully one day get her to choose reason and logic over religious bullshit. I'm hoping that our discussion provided a quick breeze of reason that shook the leaves on her mental tree of religious indoctrination that was probably planted by her parents at a young age. I'm hoping that my sharp comments annoyed her to the point that she decided to go home and actually research the age of the Earth and Cosmos. Who knows, perhaps she'll bring up our exchange to her parents, religious "leaders" and religious friends.
I'm also hopeful that as she walked away with her group of friends--who said nothing during the exchange and may not have heard any of it for all I know--she made a smart alec comment to them about "that silly evolutionist" or "evil science believer". I'm hoping this led to a discussion by them where her friends were able to unify around science and reason to say "Sorry sweetie, we're your friends and we're religious like you but there are just some things that you can't take on faith or because the Bible says so." I still have hope that there are Christians that are not Bible literalists. For the sake of the future I sure hope there are.
Those of us that embrace science and support the scientific method must continue having exchanges like this, pushing the issue even when it seems to come out of nowhere. I'm no scientist and don't know everything about it but I know enough to speak up when I hear someone arguing against science or in this case having the audacity to call it "fake news" to speak up. We must counter thinking like this any chance we get. We must be unafraid to call bullshit bullshit when we hear it, even if it makes people uncomfortable, especially when that bullshit is rooted in religious delusion and flies in the face of all that science has discovered.
Reason must win out. Our future depends on it.
 |
| If you've ever seen this scene out of the movie "Idiocracy" you know that in the battle of reason and religious belief, reason must prevail. Our future depends on it. |
This weekend, my wife, kids and I loaded up and hit up my hometown fair. It's become a tradition of sorts to hit it up at least once each year since we still live fairly close and as the kids continue to grow, they are starting to appreciate the fun that fairs offer. (Believe it or not I do take moments away from atheist activism to enjoy the simple things in life. Or at least I tried this weekend as you'll find out from this story...)
So we arrive to the fairgrounds and start doing what any typical family with three small children do: we hit up some rides, we complained about the heat and tried to survive the requests for potty breaks that seemed to come every five minutes. The potty break that sets this story in motion comes compliments of our oldest. Him and I make our way to the main building on the fairgrounds, an air conditioned pavilion that is popular for events like wedding receptions.
I guide him to the bathroom and since he's a "big kid," I no longer have to help him out so I stand outside the bathroom where I notice a display on German Iowans. As a history nerd, it sucks me in. I take a few seconds to glance at the headers to get a feel for what the display is about. Before I know it my son finishes his business and joins me. Realizing that we need to meet back up with my wife, other kids and some other family for lunch, I begin to snap a few photos of the display so that I can read it later.
 |
| An example of the displays I was trying to read when I bumped into the young Earth creationist. |
There's a group of teen girls standing in front of one of the final displays so I politely ask them to take a step over so I an get a photo. They happily oblige. It's in that moment that I notice that one of them is rocking a Ben Carson for President t-shirt. It catches me off guard. It's been more than a year since the Iowa Caucus and well over a year since he dropped out. Also, in these parts, you never see any teens wearing political attire and if you do it's some distraught Bernie supporter still wailing about HRC and the DNC (and rightfully so) or some asshole Trump supporter trying to stick his win and subsequent presidency down your throat (MERIKA!).
I immediately think back to the one and only time I challenged Mr. Carson in person and how idiotic I thought his responses were to my questions. Not only that, but knowing that a lot of his worldviews as it pertained to how he would lead our country was based in his religious beliefs makes my stomach turn when I think about him. I really wanted to know at this point: Is this teen wearing his shirt because she supports him or his stances on things or is she wearing it ironically to look hip?
 |
| A screengrab of CSPAN's coverage of me challenging then presidential candidate Ben Carson on his deeply held beliefs and how they would impact his White House. |
I toss out "Wow, Ben Carson, really?!" with a smirk.
Without hesitation she replies with an enthusiastic "Yes!"
It was at that moment painfully obvious that she's an ardent supporter of his, or at least "was" an ardent supporter while he was running.
I want to learn more so I snap a photo of the final display and then lean over and quip "You realize he believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, right?"
The question was less about Mr. Carson's religious beliefs--although I think they're batshit crazy--it was more about hoping that since she was a young millennial, someone that has had the world at her fingertips that has had the opportunity to use the internet since birth to debunk any bogus claim to come her way, that she perhaps hadn't heard that about him and would be caught off guard by this nugget.
Nope.
"I do too! It says so in the Bible!" she responds.
Wow. Just wow.
 |
| Just had to. |
I'm completely dumbfounded. Now obviously all of this happened in a matter of a few seconds but it felt like an eternity as I sat there trying to process what was happening. Here you have an otherwise very intelligent teen that I assumed grew up in the same community that I did, buying into the religious delusion that our Earth isn't a few billion years old but merely 6,000 years old despite growing up with access to all of the information humanity has ever accumulated at her fingertips.
What went wrong? I wondered.
How did she get so led astray from reason, critical thinking and science?
So I asked her.
"So you're telling me that you choose to believe in a 6,000 year old Earth because some archaic collection of stories from the Middle East tell you over what science has discovered?"
"Science is fake news!" she arrogantly proclaims with a smirk.
WHAT.
THE.
FUCK?!
Now obviously I didn't say this to her but this was the first and only thing that I thought of when I heard her say that to me. This was also the first time her voice had raised and I could tell that she was ready for this discussion.
As much as I really want to get into a long, drawn out discussion with her, this is where the "bottom" completely fell out of this conversation for me. This was the moment where I realized that her delusion wasn't something that she wears on the surface to "fit in" at her church. This is a deeply ingrained delusion that has been planted there since as long as she could probably understand the words her parents were telling her. It's not that I was giving up or retreating, it was that I knew that it as going to take more than a quick run-in at a county fair to try and reverse years of religious coercion that she had experienced.
This was a disgusting display of the dangers of childhood indoctrination in my humble opinion. It was proof of what happens when you take a young, innocent and impressionable mind and cram it full of, as Seth Andrews of the Thinking Atheist says, "religious woo".
It was another reminder to me, as a parent of three young children, to begin focusing on demonstrating critical thinking skills, teaching them how to reason through statements that they are told and how to understand the difference between evidence based theories and deeply held beliefs. Childhood indoctrination is one of the worst forms of child abuse out there in my opinion. I won't do it to my kids and sure as hell don't want others to do it to their kids. Look at what it does wit the unfortunate spawn of Westboro Baptist Church members if you think indoctrination "isn't that bad".
 |
| So much love. Innocent victims of very, very bad ideas. |
My final effort to better understand this poor, misguided young woman was to ask if she was homeschooled. Perhaps this was based on a bad stereotype of all homeschooled children being raised as fundamentalist Christians but I at least wanted to try to wrap my head around how she came to this point. To my surprise but later disgust, she said she wasn't.
This tells me that either, her upbringing was so fundamentalist, so religiously conservative, that she entered public school with the foundation of creationism already laid down. Imagine all of the things that her teachers tried teaching her that she was probably later told to ignore. Imagine all of the things she's yet to learn that will undoubtedly rock her very understanding of the world around her. It's fair to say that you don't run into too many young Earth creationists in Eastern Iowa. She's my first that I've ever ran into in Iowa and I've lived here for 35 years now. The only other set of creationists I've ever met from Eastern Iowa I met after the Ark Encounter protest in Kentucky last year. That was wild.
 |
| I had to drive 9 hours to meet creationists that call Iowa home. |
I don't know. I just don't have the answers.
A friend of mine and EIA member recently shared with me that when she began a college biology class, she remembers the professor taking a moment to put out a disclaimer that evolution is real and accepted by the scientific community, and that creationism is not and would not promoted or accepted as science in that class. The friend shared how completely caught off guard she was by the whole experience, noting how the student proceeded to be blown away at all of the scientific basics that she assumed everyone knew. It reminded me of an experience that I had in college.
In 2010 I went back to school as a non-traditional student to pursue a degree in Professional Photography from Hawkeye College in Waterloo, Iowa, one of the premiere photography colleges in the country. (I'm a very proud graduate and have been saying that since long before I was ever a student there so don't think for a second that I was paid to say that for them! Haha!)
My first year class was in a color theory class when my professor made it clear he had no time for creationism in his classroom. As he began to talk about where color comes from and how the human brain perceives color he paused to make a statement about how he had ZERO interest in debating the origin of mankind, the age of the Earth or Cosmos. Right away a young woman in front of me from Wisconsin "showed her cards" as someone that accepts the creation story at least by putting her head down on her desk and shaking it back and forth in creationist disgust. She made it apparent that her deeply held beliefs object to science and reason. I'm so happy looking back to know that one of my favorite professors was taking a stand against religious bullshit in his classroom.
Back to the experience I had with the young Earth creationist teen, having now connected it to the experience in college, it makes me wonder if the reports of the United States entering the age of Idiocracy are true. When did anti-intellectualism become sexy? Or a virtue, something to boast proudly about? When was being arrogant about your religious ignorance seen as being some kind of patriot for your deeply held beliefs?
 |
| The only caption I could think of was #smh. |
It's up to you and I to stop this nonsense. It's up to you and I to challenge this every time we have the opportunity. Hear a wisecrack about evolution, RESPOND. Hear someone tell a child that something happened because of God, RESPOND. Notice that someone is wearing a Ben Carson for President, RESPOND.
You don't have to be a dick about it. I stand by my exchange with this creationist as a respectful exchange about a difference in worldviews; one based on evidence and the other on delusion. There were no insults. She would probably agree that it was just a fun conversation with a random dad she ran into at fair, despite the fact that we completely disagreed with one another.
I'm hoping that our brief encounter with this teen creationist will become a "memory marble" for her (any Inside Out fans out there?), one that begins to sew the seeds of doubt that will hopefully one day get her to choose reason and logic over religious bullshit. I'm hoping that our discussion provided a quick breeze of reason that shook the leaves on her mental tree of religious indoctrination that was probably planted by her parents at a young age. I'm hoping that my sharp comments annoyed her to the point that she decided to go home and actually research the age of the Earth and Cosmos. Who knows, perhaps she'll bring up our exchange to her parents, religious "leaders" and religious friends.
 |
| I absolutely love Inside Out and had to reference it in a blog somehow. #memorymarbles |
Those of us that embrace science and support the scientific method must continue having exchanges like this, pushing the issue even when it seems to come out of nowhere. I'm no scientist and don't know everything about it but I know enough to speak up when I hear someone arguing against science or in this case having the audacity to call it "fake news" to speak up. We must counter thinking like this any chance we get. We must be unafraid to call bullshit bullshit when we hear it, even if it makes people uncomfortable, especially when that bullshit is rooted in religious delusion and flies in the face of all that science has discovered.
Reason must win out. Our future depends on it.
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