they have to be a bit dim voting WG Bush in, not once but twice …

Well wait till 2012 When the Sarah Palin/ Michelle Bachmann presidential ticket will take dumbing down to a new low.

given that America has a much higher Christian population than the rest of the world, surly youd expect their answers to reflect this?

Well that is like saying that Christians are stupid. Many other countries have high levels of Christian worship but do not show this level of ignorance.

Actually, I kind of doubt that. Huge swatches of South & Central America and Africa are notionally Christian. The population of Brazil alone is pretty close to that of the USA and they're a fiercely christian country, yet they seem to manage without all the Intelligent Design/Creationist doo-wap quite well.

There's something peculiarly American about believing just about every crackpot theory that the rest of the world seems far too pragmatic to embrace in any real way.

Jon

What is it with that party and demented MILFs? You'd be quite happy about it if they weren't so bloody world-dangerous

Yes they are both remarkably out of touch with reality. The Republican party are currently imploding. They are losing money and members. Yet the right wing will still support them till they are extinct.

There is a certain brand of Christianity which rejects anything that is not in the Bible. They are very vocal, and seem to hold great sway over some aspects of public opinion.

Yes but I was not going to group all Christians as stupid. Yes the Christian fundamentalists are a class of stupidity above any other.

Call me weird but in the grand hierarchy of stupidity I'd put strapping a load of explosives onto yourself and then blowing up yourself and a load of innocent people somewhere above believing the world was made in seven days.

That guy who wanted to blow up a plane but didn't make the bomb right so basically only managed to badly burn his own genitals? I'd say that's pretty stupid.

Yes the Islamic fundamentalists are just as bad, Though I was comparing just Christian idiocy. Those that bomb in the name of Islam are also heads and shoulders above the majority of muslims in stupidity terms

Stupid people are a universal constant. Sadly the US doesn't have some monopoly on stupidity, our own fair isle is doing very nicely in keeping our average up.

I would say that while we have our thickos they do not deny evolution simply because they do not believe it. They know that someone has worked it out even if that they do not know how it actually works they understand that is the way it is. Europe does at least not let religion overwhelm facts.

The population of Europe is mostly Catholic, Orthodox, or one of the established Protestant denominations that has been housebroken through long association with government. The Orthodox religions have rarely had any opportunity to fight the sciences being predominant in the areas where little science has ever been done. The Catholics learned the hard way by fighting Copernicus and Galileo and making fools of themselves. And the wishy washy west European established Protestant churches spent their early centuries fighting scriptural heresy with little time to spend on attacking the sciences.

The US has a longer tradition of separation of church and state than any of us do, which means that government has never exercised any real control over religion (thickies tend to assume that the separation only keeps the church out of politics and never consider the reverse application). And many of their main religious denominations are ones that have spread west due to persecution somewhere in the east (including in some cases the east coast of the USA).

They overwhelmingly stress a direct personal relationship with God that is not emphasised in the same way on the old world, even in Protestant churches. As such, they also emphasise each person's own interpretation of scripture, whereas Europeans emphasise the role professional scholarship and interpretation. This is why simplistic interpretations of the Bible are so prevalent in the USA, and the literal truth of that book is assumed.

So the American tradition is not so impossible to understand. Although that doesn't mean it isn't stupid. For instance, almost no scholarship is required to know that Revelations is only in the Bible because the greatest of all Christian scholars (St Augustine) selected it. As any fool knows, he only became a Christian because the Bishop of Milan (Ambrose) persuaded him that the Bible should not be taken literally. And Augustine selected Revelations because he interpreted it as describing the rise of the Catholic church in Rome (not the end of the world to come). So Americans who read revelations and look for signs that it is coming to pass soon, are horribly undereducated on the very subject that they deem most important. Yet this absurdity is a commonplace in the USA. So please continue to regard them with scorn.