Profiles in Theocracy: Obvious Theocrat is Obvious

Via TPM:

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
....
“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
...

 “What I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it,” he said. “It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”

 

It's not actually necessarily true that anyone needs to deny evolution or embryology (embryology!?) or the Big Bang theory in order to accept a savior. There are any number of practicing, believing Christians who manage to understand and appreciate science and have faith in their Saviour. While I find his rejection of evidence-based knowledge appalling as a non-believer, I'm actually more disgusted at his dismissal of the honest believer's good-faith attempt to reconcile evidence with practice of religion in order to obtain as clear a view of the world in which he or she lives as possible.   His view of the universe--and policy towards his fellow human being, is top-down and dictated by his interpretation of a bronze/iron age work of religious literature that doesn't always relate to the world as we've come to know it.

Evolution-denial doesn't shock me, naturally. But embryology-denial is a kind of wink at the pro-life idea that life as we know it starts at conception, I think. Turn away from the wee, not yet humaniform blastocyst you might envision because of science--see instead a Baby Jesus plucked fresh from the Nativity creche, and you have a more anti-abortion mindset. One might well guess.  Unless there is some other nifty reason to suppose  one is impregnated with a wholly-formed homunculus from Day Jizz.

The video is a freakshow largely because of the antlered disembodied-head back-drop. But just think of the crown some cat would have in heaven if all those bagged deer were instead souls saved for glory and rescued from the misapprehension that we human beings were formed by adaptation into tool-using symbol-slinging upright-walking omnivores with a penchant for occasionally tossing feces at things that scared us.

I'm not the scientist Dr. Broun is, but I have every reason from observation to suppose many of our unhairy ape brethren do toss feces at things that scare us, and someone like Rep. Broun is scared of more things than most.  Thus, he calls basic science a tool of Satan. Thus, he befouls it with his own intellectually-chicken shit.

I don't care much for theocrats, if you haven't noticed.