“what, like the flintstones?”

That quote about the Flintstones comes from America’s favorite television gangster, Tony Soprano. One Good Move has a great clip from the last episode of the show (HBO’s “The Sopranos”), in which Tony, convalescing in the hospital after being shot, is visited by a Christian fundamentalist hell-bent on convincing him that dinosaurs once walked the Earth with man. It’s great stuff, and it got me thinking that producers of every show on television should be looking for creative ways to work in story lines that point out just how ridiculous those in the Christian anti-science movement really are.

I’d read years ago that our government had popularized the concept of the “designated driver” by approaching a number of powerful Hollywood execs and asking that they drop in the phrase as often as possible during a particular period of time, in hopes that the idea would slowly creep into the collective unconscious of Americans, and thereby decrease the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities. I’ve never seen any evidence that they succeeded in decreasing instances of drunk driving, but those behind the campaign were definitely successful in introducing the concept of the “designated driver” into the American vocabulary.

Well, I think that it’s probably time that someone high-up in the scientific community starts making phone calls to those same people. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we need to use every tool in our arsenal to combat this idiotic nonsense about the world only being 6,000 years old, and humans coexisting with dinosaurs. It is dangerous and destructive stuff, and, if more of our fellow citizens are convinced of it, you can bet that the negative consequences will be seen in our classrooms, and that the ramifications will trickle though our society for decades to come. If there was ever a time that we needed science, it is now. We can not turn a blind eye to the problems of the world, trusting that God will come and rescue us in one glorious moment of rapture. We need reality.

Here, back to “The Sopranos,” is the response from Tony’s cousin Chris after the Intelligent Design guy walks out of the room:

What’s he saying – that there were dinosaurs back with Adam and Eve? Now way. T Rex in the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve would be runnin’ all the time, scared shitless. But the Bible says it was paradise.”