Ah...SCIENCE!

Or at least that's what they're calling it in some parts of Louisiana these days.

From Scotland:

THOUSANDS of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real – in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland’s most famous mythological beast is a living creature.

Thousands of children are to receive publicly-funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools – which follow a strict fundamentalist curriculum.

The Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme teaches controversial religious beliefs, aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.

And school voucher money is supporting this!

Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by Republican state governor Bobby Jindal, a Hindu convert to Catholicism.

So there's just a little less money going to real science education in order to teach that the Loch Ness monster disproves Darwin.

But what of this "Accelerated Christian Education" program?  Guess what?  Like everything else in the  known universe, it has a website.

Based on the curriculum, by the 5th grade, a student:

Discovers the Bible to be the final authority in scientific matters.[emphasis in original]

Oh, that's SO GOOD TO KNOW!  I'm scouring my Bible right now looking some insight into that whole "particle/wave" duality thing.  Is light a wave or a particle?  How is it that when one tests to see if it's a wave one sees a wave but when one tests to see if it's a particle one sees particles.

Let me say it again, if we are a nation in decline this has to be one of the reasons - a willful, stubborn, religiously-inspired anti-intellectual retreat from science.