A Failure of Education

There is a good editorial today in the NYT about the depths of time and how 14 billion years play out in cosmology and in evolution. This quote struck me as a truism:

Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.

And that's really the way I see it. People ask me all the time, "what have you got against religion?". The answer is largely, every religion asks me to give up my freewill to their chosen representatives of their god and, usually soon afterward, the de-education begins.

Find me a religion where I can keep my scientific skepticism, keep my free will, keep meddlesome priests and shamans out of the line between me and the gods, and leaves me free to strongly hold the possibility that the gods don't exist at all, and maybe I would think about it.

So far, only free thinking allows me those choices.