Judeo-Christian fundamentalism is scientifically disproven.

You know, I love the way that science works, whereby things are only ever disproven, not proven. This's very powerful. It just occurred to me, as I was having supper w/ my beautiful wife, that not only are (Christian) fundamentalists wrong, but we know they're wrong. Pope Benedict has recently said that the Bible's statements shouldn't be taken as "scientific" statements describing a literal truth, and here he points at Gensis specifically. In my case, I don't have a particular gripe with Genesis per se, and, while I applaud his statement, I think there's a better tack to take as regards falling into the fundamentalist error. This error is at the crux of Protestantism, the idea that anyone should be able to read the Bible, when it was never meant as literal truth (including the Revelations of John of Patmos being included in the canonical books only w/ the specific understanding that they not be taken literally). An unfortunate result of the otherwise laudible democratization of Bible-readership, though, is exemplified by the Left Behind series and all the Apocalyptarian horse-manure from which it's grown. We all know that the King James Bible is not, in fact, a literal translation, but a poetic one. But, even if we didn't have the historical facts that point to this (and I don't have them at my fingertips to cite them), the translation is immaterial: the stories are not all factually true in the scientific sense. My counterexample, which I raise to the fundamentalists, comes thanks to good old Bill Cosby. I was thinking about his story of Noah and bringing in all the animals two-by-two--his joke goes to the difficulty of selecting one each male and female mosquito. It's a funny dialog. The thing is, though, that there is only one (vertibrate) animal species on the planet that has decended from a single male-female pair: cheetas. The genetic record conclusively demonstrates that cheetas suffered a total genetic bottleneck, but they're the ONLY animals we're aware of, humans included, for which this can be shown. All other (vertibrate) animal species alive today have groups of breeding pairs as their ancestors, or came down to such near-extinction during more recently recorded history. It's not that other species might be found to have had such a bottle-neck, but the sheer overwhelming percentage of species for which such a bottle-neck has been conclusively ruled out. If you assert, as do the Fundamentalists, that the whole Bible is the literal truth and Word, then such truth stands or falls on the validity of any portion thereof, and, since we know the story of Noah not to be literally true, we therefore know the Bible as a whole not to be so, even without the other evidence to the contrary (like, for example, the fact that the happy ending in Job wasn't part of the original text, &c).

This does nothing to refute any portion of Judeo-Christian morality. Mitzvahs are still Mitzvahs; Cheeks should still be turned, &c. But, it puts another skewer through the program of all the neuvo-Pharisees promenading around calling themselves "Christian".