The Fall Of The House of Ussher

"I may be rancid butter but I'm on your side of the bread."
               --- E.K. Hornbeck in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit The Wind

      Just when you thought that the spurious -- and desperate -- claims of the long-dead Bishop Ussher had been dismissed even by the most ardent Christian fundamentalists, along comes this mind-stammering project in absurdity. At least such folks are consistent in their ignorance: in railing so vehemently against the notion of evolution, they fervently maintain their resistance to any sort of intellectual evolution. I'm reminded of that classic exchange from Inherit The Wind between Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady:

BRADY:... The Bible gives a fine account of the flood. But your professor is a little mixed up on his dates. That rock is not more than six thousand years old.
DRUMMOND: How do you know?
BRADY: A fine Biblical scholar, Bishop Usher [sic], has determined for us the exact date and hour of the Creation. It occurred in the Year 4,004 B.C.
DRUMMOND: That's Bishop Usher's opinion.
BRADY: It is not an opinion. It is literal fact, which the good Bishop arrived at through careful computation of the ages of the prophets as set down in the Old Testament. In fact, he determined that the Lord began the Creation on the 23rd of October in the Year 4,004 B.C. -- at uh, at 9 A.M.!
DRUMMOND: That Eastern Standard Time? [laughter] or Rocky Mountain Time?

Now that I think of it, that play should probably be dusted off and done again for the Cheney, er, Bush team-- and Bill O'Reilly (that's pronounced "Oh, riled-he") and his cadre of lunatic out-patients. I'm not bashing those who believe in religions of any sort; but when people ignore science, history, and fact with the same flippancy of a teenager watching Murder, She Wrote, it's hard not to wonder if such people aren't the cement shoes weighing society down in the water. And, yes, my double negatives runneth over. :-)