Toto, we're not in an intelligently designed political state anymore: Okay, Kansas moves one step closer to teaching intelligent design to its public school students. Is it a little surprising? Yeah, it is. But, certainly the writing was on the wall.

What confuses me more however is the impetus:

"We think this is a great development ... for the academic freedom of students," said John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design theory.

Hmmm, okay, it's about "academic freedom." I suppose that isn't a bad thing. So, one presumes that Kansas will soon be teaching about crop circles being evidence of alien visitations, how tinfoil hats keep the government waves from controlling our actions, and how L Ron Hubbard may be on to something after all.

See, the push for ID in schools is not about "academic freedom." Those behind ID are about pushing an agenda, specifically designed to advance a belief-based curriculum. Whatever you may think about evolution; it is God-neutral - it neither advances, nor curbs, the proposition that everything on earth (and all around us for that matter) was created by some higher, sentient being. It just says that once the spark of life got here, however that was, the way we are now came about due to things like natural selection.

The important part of course, is that Darwin's theories are scientifically supportable. It doesn't mean that we might not find ways to scientifically alter them, or even disprove them one day. But, to teach kids that life as we know it was/is intentionally designed, by one mother-fucker of an engineer, is not only not provable, it's not even demonstrable. It's like saying "Yellow is the most beautiful color around, because I can't imagine a more beautiful one, therefore it must have been created by a divine artist." The whole theory is self-centered - in our perception of what is possible - as opposed to what is objectively demonstrated by observance and testing.

Evolution should not be viewed as the end-all, be-all, nor a threat to religious belief in general. It should just be viewed, rightly, as the best scientific explanation going. ID has no real foundation in science, it is merely an alternative - one that is not entirely crack-pot, but one that is nonetheless as provable or demonstrable as my deeply-held belief that the divine drunken otter in the sky made us by accident. Weep for Kansas...weep.