ID, 2

This is a great comment by reddevil on my Intelligent Design post from earlier today.

That is pretty much how I approached it for a very long time - and it is perfectly reasonable. And it is the original point of Intelligent Design, which has since been hijacked and mutated (ha!) into a very hot, contentious, political/social issue.

My "problem" with most organized religions is that they are so literal. Try to tell many conservative Christians, Jews, or Muslims that their books are parables meant to tell a story and convey a message, written by men, of a specific society, in a specific time, at a specific technological and scientific state of knowledge that were all very different and not as advanced as our own, and they will throw a serious fit. I fear our leaders belong to that group of people, or at least cater to them. People fear change, and by harnessing that fear with the "threat" that teaching real science, they are doing quite well.