You Say Potarto

In the UK everyone knows that conservatives are the party for the rich and Labour is the one for the poor. No one is really sure what the liberals do - not even the liberals.

American conservatives are a different thing: they call themselves Republicans. Not being American, I'm not sure where they are come from, but peering into the goldfish bowl, Republicans are intellectually devoid buy dint of religion.

The most recent (2008) election brought this into sharper focus than ever before.

John McCain did not consider himself sufficiently right-wing to appeal to traditional conservative voters, so he brought in Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin.

Despite being demonstrably ignorant in the extreme, the undeniably attractive and charismatic Palin actually gave the republican party a serious chance of re-election in spite of the almighty mess almost eight years of the Bush administration had left the country in.

This is terrifying.

I reserve judgement about President Obama - it's too early to tell. A little over a decade ago, Tony Blair looked like the saving grace for troubled Britain - and now we're in deeper shit than ever. Like many of my peers I hope against hope that Obama won't be a shadowy reflection of Blair. So far things look promising - but he's not even in the oval office yet.

And the Republicans have not given up.

Unlike the UK, America is a very religious country. We don't tend to notice on a day-to-day basis because it shares a similar religious basis as the UK's historical mono-theistic Christianity. America was founded by people fleeing religious persecution in England and it's a history that the young country clings to even to this day.

Yet in spite of being technologically advanced, a massive cross-section of the American public not only believes in the Christian god, they also think it created the world exactly as described in the bible. An idea favoured in Blighty until a century or so ago when Charles Darwin published his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Religious people didn't like Darwin's theory because it is directly opposed to theistic creation and while some have adapted their ideas to incorporate evolution (theistic evolution) where a god(s) guides the changes species, the vast majority find it too hard to accept.

The bible is their book of life - they read from and study it ad-nauseum yet fail miserably to detect the myriad patent errors.

America is a country in crisis: country in great pain. A pain that is a by-product of wilful ignorance.

It's OK to believe in some form of supernatural entity to replace the things that we don't understand, but to deny the things that we have learned and replace them with the supernatural is stupid and dangerous.

I don't believe in god - I believe there are things we cannot prove and may never be able to.

To deny facts is more dangerous than Islamic fundamentalism.

Right, now I have some potatoes to harvest.