Your "read the whole damn thing" for the day

Here.

Some key quotes:

I should probably mention why this topic is an important one for me. Young-earth creationism is a particular pet peeve of mine for two main reasons.

The first is that it is not just false, but demonstrably false, and is thus often the place where the collapse begins for soon-to-be-former Christians raised to believe in the fundamentalist house of cards.

This house-of-cards faith is a particularly brittle and fragile belief system that insists, emphatically, that all of it must be true or else none of it is true....

And that very long chain is only as strong as its weakest link (to mix both my metaphor and my quiz show reference). If every item isn't true -- or isn't blindly accepted as true -- then they insist that it all must be false. Thus if it is not true that the world was created in six, 24-hour days about 6,800 years ago, then it is not true that Jesus loves you. Or that you should love others as Jesus has loved you. Or that your sins are forgiven. Or that you are anything but alone and godforsaken when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

House-of-cards fundamentalism allows for no distinctions between babies and bathwater, between the central tenets of the faith and the adiaphora and error. So once one part of this belief system begins to collapse -- as it inevitably will since young-earth creationism is disprovable -- then it all has to go.

Much more in there. To have cast the Big Bang as evidence of Satan's existence is probably the stupidest thing American nutter Christians have done so far, but it's early yet. Unless, of course, you're a nutter Christian, in which case it's much too late to avoid the rapture.