29% of UK teachers favor teaching creationism

Well, look, we believe the opposite of almost all of that, but we don't find your insistence at all rude or offensive. What's rude about a full-throated defense of one's position? Right or wrong, people are entitled to make the best case for their views.That's what I've never really understood about you, Faith, how you take it so personally that we hold unapologetically to a different view than you do, like it's just something we do to piss you off. I don't get that. My conclusions that the Bible is not the word of God - that there is no such thing as God - and that evolution is the scientific explanation of the history and diversity of life on Earth are conclusions I held long before we ever met. What on Earth do they have to do with you, and why would telling you that my conclusions are different than yours be something for you to take offense about?

I guess that's not the impression I get from your posts, or from your blogging on the exchanges that happen here. (My apologies if you didn't intend that I read those; I'll stop, if that's your request.)Let me ask you this, then, by way of trying to reach some clarity. If you take a position, and you get a reply from me that says "Faith, you're just flat-out wrong about this" is that something you take personally? If you being wrong is then ascribed to not knowing a fact that we knew, is that what you take personally? I don't see it as any higher than the indignation you display about how we're openly dismissive of the Bible and the "word of God" you believe contained therein. And I get that - your faith is so important to you that you made it your EvC username. Many of your blog posts are a full-throated defense of faith in God. If that's what you believe, it's to your credit to defend it as strongly as you can. (I disagree about the utility of faith in anything, even in God, but you're well aware.)But just as your faith is deeply central to you, the biological sciences are deeply central to us. We're like sports fans about biology around here, why else would we be here? And the whole creationism project - the notion that untrained laymen and 14-year-olds with open Bibles can know better than a million man-hours of painstaking research into the natural world, the notion that superstition is to be placed on the same level as science, particularly in our childrens' textbooks - is just so deeply insulting to us, and to the level of effort and expense we and our colleagues have put into being able to have even the slightest idea of what's going on out there in the world, that yeah, we start from a position of indignation about it. You would, too. You do, too, when the subject is the Bible.But for whatever you think about our level of indignation, I hope you'll remember our level of enthusiasm when it comes to being able to answer your questions - not rebut your statements - about biology, geology, and the other subjects we've worked a long time to know even the first thing about. The enthusiasm isn't for being able to "show off" for you, or at the prospect of winning a convert - although that's a hope. It's the enthusiasm for having the opportunity to show you the incredible beauty of it all - a beauty you've not yet seen even a small fraction of.

I... guess, but even the most charitable interpretation of her ministry to the dying in Calcutta didn't, in a practical sense, really do any good for them. In almost every case she denied them analgesics and gave them water; as any hospice worker can tell you, giving water to the dying for the most part just prolongs their suffering. (Hospice instructions to families frequently caution them not to succumb to the false mercy of a glass of water.)Completely outside the question of whether Mother Theresa prized suffering for its theological value, her actions certainly caused a great deal of needless suffering. A lot of people just have the wrong idea, factually, of what MT saw herself as there to do for the terminally ill of Calcutta - to make sure they were present and cognizant for every agonizing minute.