Both ancient Egypt along with other areas of the Middle East and China had periods of great discovery and invention. But it all stopped with the intervention of religion which brought us hundreds of years of stagnation and ignorance and violent death. In the west, since the days of the Renaissance, we have seen wondrous advancements of all sorts including our brief venture into space beyond low earth orbit. Only in the past couple of decades has China begun to experience a rebirth of curiousity about the world and the universe beyond. China now has more citizens learned in the sciences and math than the U.S. has college graduates. China graduates a half million scientists from its colleges every year. The U.S. graduates a half million lawyers every year. Americans are having a love affair with ignorance. We are stupid and proud of it.
The U.S. is receding. There is no longer a spirit of adventure or a desire for discovery in this country. Instead, we are more and more turning inward and backward. The growing strength and pervasiveness of religion, of whatever stamp, is both a cause and a symptom of our decline. Many turn away from science and its promise, only to embrace a book written 2000 years ago by those who believed the earth to be flat and the center of the universe; a time when only about 1% or 2% of humans were even marginally literate. Millions praise and pray to a jealous, violent and supposedly all powerful phantom for whom there is not one iota of proof of its existence. Are we now entering another dark age?
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