I consistently follow the blog Pharyngula by PZ Myers. He is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota and he writes quite a bit about Atheism and religion. Today he was interviewed by a German website called the hpd about his blog, Atheism and its cultural acceptance in the USA. Here’s a section of it:
4. The United States were founded as a secular nation, yet it turned out to be the most religious of all western democracies. What, do you think, are the main causes of that development?
Europe tossed out its craziest and most extreme and most religious elements, and sent them abroad. From our founding, we’ve been built of disparate colonies that were often initially established to shelter religious oddballs.
We also have a constitution that guarantees protection of religious belief, broadly defined. It meant that this was an environment in which the wildest ideas could be expressed and sheltered by the government, so we’ve actually had the opportunity for a little natural selection of religious ideas, and the most extreme have done relatively well.
5. How worried are you about the future of secularism in the United States?
Very. I think we’re at a tipping point here; we could correct the slide into irrationality and become an Enlightenment state once again, or if the crazies succeed in demolishing our educational system, we could be on a one-way slide to third-world status in the next few generations.
You can find the full interview in English here.
