Only someone close to George Bush's inner circle could say whether the misguided policies emanating from Washington are the result of the president's "deadly combination of faith and ignorance", or of his deliberate pandering to the ignorant in order to hang on to power.

This article looks at several examples of ignorance at work: in the deeply flawed US policies on global warming and AIDS prevention, and in the way in which religious lobbying has been able to create confusion about evolution in the public mind. But America has no monopoly of ignorance, and in another article in this issue (Creeping Jihad p 8), we look at how Islamic ignorance and intolerance are making increasing inroads into western society.

The war in Iraq, global warming and AIDS prevention are just a few examples of what has become a guiding principle on the part of many governments: to keep their people in a state of ignorance, to spin defeat into victory, and lies into an alternative reality. Few governments - from Washington to Beijing, from London to Riyadh and from Moscow to Teheran - seem immune from this temptation.

The Lost War

Few Americans seem aware that the war in Iraq has been lost. The grand idea, to install democracy by force as an example to the rest of the Middle East, has ended with an Iraq that is physically devastated; in financial ruin following the corruption of the interim government and the "no-bid" contracts given to vice- president Cheney's business cronies; on the brink of civil war; with a constitution that guarantees that the country will become an Islamic theocracy; and with the world-wide forces of Islamic Jihad stronger than ever.

But this is not what Americans are being told by their government and its co-conspirators, the symbiotic conservative media. Both government and media overplay every small success and downplay every disaster. If Iraq be success, how shall we measure failure?

Global Warming

The destruction of the city of New Orleans and with it much of the America's oil refining capacity by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - among the most powerful ever to hit the Gulf Coast of America - were almost certainly due to recent warming of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a warming until now denied by the oil industry. As recently as May this year, the International Policy Network, a nominally independent think tank heavily funded by the oil industry, described climate change as "a myth". Poetic justice rarely comes so swiftly. But as is so often the case, it was the poor, the weak and the innocent who paid the highest price.

In February this year a scientific conference called by the British government to inform the Gleneagles G8 summit, warned of impending "dangerous climate change", while in June, an unprecedented statement from the world's leading academies of science called for urgent action on global warming. In the words of New Scientist, the response from Gleneagles was a disgrace. The scientists' concerns were simply brushed aside by Bush, Blair and their colleagues.

As long ago as 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, George Bush senior had agreed that "increasing levels of greenhouse gasses result in global warming". Yet 13 years later, with our vastly increased knowledge of the reality of global warming, the best that his son could manage was that greenhouse gasses were "associated with" global warming, with no recognition that cuts in greenhouse emissions have become an urgent necessity. In July, an Asian-Pacific partnership of six nations including the US, China and India did agree to co-operate on technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but most scientists doubt whether any purely technical fix can prevent global warming from ultimately triggering climatic disaster.

Ignorance in the absence of information may sometimes be excusable, but wilful ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence is surely incomprehensible - unless, of course, one is motivated less by the future of the planet than by the short-term interests of the oil industry.

Abstinence-only AIDS Prevention Programs

At the risk of sounding like a geriatric obsessive, I have to return again to the infamy of the US Administration policy on AIDS prevention. All of the evidence available from scientific and medical sources, from sociologists, NGO workers and field surveys makes it overwhelmingly clear that the policy of preaching abstinence as the way of preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS in Africa has totally failed. Yet the Bush administration continues to insist that the promotion of abstinence must form the major part of any US-funded AIDS prevention program.

Uganda was at the centre of the AIDS pandemic during the 1980s and the first country in Africa to seriously tackle the disease. As a result, the HIV prevalence rate dropped from over 15% in 1990 to under 7% in 2004. But things have now taken a decided turn for the worse. A deliberate change of policy based on religious dogma has led to a condom shortage and to the promotion of abstinence, supported among others by the evangelical Christian wife of President Museveni. The president himself attacked the widespread use of condoms at an AIDS conference in Bangkok last year. The massive shortfall in the supply of condoms is wreaking havoc with the Ugandan AIDS prevention program. Where billboards used to advertise condom use: "for the best protection", now they promote simply Abstinence. The problem is compounded by U.S. government policy which provides support for AIDS prevention programs "only when there is an emphasis on abstinence and when condoms are provided only for high- risk groups such as prostitutes and the military". Stephen Lewis, Kofi Annan's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, has said: "There is no question that the condom crisis is being driven and exacerbated by the extreme policies of the U.S." (Time Magazine, Sept 26, 2005).

By spending millions of Dollars preaching abstinence to young women and girls in no position to abstain, while cutting back on the supply of urgently needed condoms, the American government is revealing to the world the dark side of its Christian ethic: "Do nothing that will enable the promiscuous to escape God's punishment!" It is difficult to see the difference between such Christian bigotry and the behaviour of the Islamists who stone young women to death for the "crime" of being raped. Well, of course, there is a difference. Only a few girls have been stoned to death for being raped. Untold thousands of women in Africa are dying after being unnecessarily infected with AIDS.

Abstinence-only programs have been well dubbed "Ignorance only". The Christian Right is obsessed by the concept of evil. They see it everywhere - except it seems in their own backyard. For any Humanist, the idea of promoting policies known to fail is, by any definition, an evil act. And it is a sad and awful fact that it is the Christian bigots and their bumptiously ignorant president who are the source of this evil.

A president who hears God's voice telling him to rule by faith, not fact, should be unelectable in any civilised society.

"Let them starve"

The World Food Program estimates that between 2 and 2.5 million people are in danger of dying of starvation in the African state of Niger. A combination of drought, locusts and government mismanagement has brought the country to its knees. Niger is at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index, and one in four of its children will not live to see their fifth birthday. An appeal earlier this year by the World Food Program for $16 million for emergency food supplies was completely ignored by the international community. It was only when reporters started beaming back their pictures of starving babies that the WFP was finally able to raise $10 million; too little, too late. Yet in all this, one country with a substantial grain surplus that could have provided real help chose not to do so. The Bush administration has blocked aid to Niger because that country supports the International Criminal Court and has refused to grant carte-blanche immunity from prosecution to any American serviceman who might hypothetically be guilty of a crime in Niger.

One of the major issues confronting the UN Human Rights Commission is the climate of impunity that exists in many non-western countries when military personnel, police, government officials and high-ranking politicians flout the law. The International Criminal Court was designed to be part of the answer to this problem; to prevent any tin-pot dictator ever again waging genocide against his own people. To its great credit, Niger's constitution prohibits the giving of immunity to anyone, so Niger was unable to comply with America's request.

Unbelievably, Niger is only one of some 50 countries, mainly in Africa and Latin America who have been threatened in this way. In the words of Nicholas Kristof, writing in the International Herald Tribune (17 October 2005): "It looks like the ideologues in Congress and the Bush administration who backed this legislation are already hurting America more than the International Criminal Court ever could. And aside from the damage to our own image and alliances, we're taking the children of countries like Niger hostage by threatening: Unless you give us an immunity agreement, those kids will die."

Kristof concludes with what he believes to be a rhetorical question: "Come on, President Bush! Is that really what your administration stands for?"

Don't ask, Mr Kristof.

Intelligent Design Theory

Massive, well-funded campaigns are underway in several American states to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design Theory (ID) in science classes as an alternative to evolution.

Intelligent Design Theory (ID), the modern successor to Creationism, is promoted as an alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection by those who feel uncomfortable with the idea that life on Earth could have evolved through natural processes without the need for a divine creator. But there is no equivalence between these two "theories". ID is not a theory in the scientific sense, it is merely speculation, unsupported by any evidence. ID proposes that the living forms we see around us are so complex that they "must have been" created by some intelligence, either in the form we see today, or, if they did evolve, through evolution guided by some supernatural intelligence. But for ID to be classed as a scientific theory it would need to postulate the mechanism by which life was created. It does not, claiming instead that it is impossible to speculate as to what that mechanism might be (but making it clear nevertheless that divine intervention is strongly suspected).

Proponents of ID also claim that evolution is "just a theory". Wrong. Evolution is fact. The evidence for evolution from palaeontology, biology, genetics, and a myriad of other scientific disciplines is overwhelming. In the words of the US National Academy of Sciences, "Evolution is as well established as any other body of knowledge in science".

The theory of evolution, however, is a scientific theory, originated by Charles Darwin in 1856, that all complex living organisms evolved by a process of mutation and natural selection from earlier, simpler forms. Since Darwin's day this theory has been constantly revised as our knowledge of the processes of evolution has grown. It was above all the discovery of DNA that brilliantly vindicated Darwin's insight by showing the mechanism by which life is transmitted from generation to generation, and by which evolution occurs.

We should no more confuse the theory of evolution - the explanation of how evolution occurs - with the irrefutable evidence that it does occur, than we should confuse the theory of gravity with gravity itself. Evolution, like gravity, is a fact.

Objections to the theory of evolution are based on a misunderstanding (deliberate or otherwise) of the nature of both evolution and scientific discovery.

For example "gaps in the fossil record" have been cited as "proving" that evolution has not happened, rather than being understood to be exactly what one would expect when searching for evidence of events that occurred tens, or even hundreds of millions of years ago. The ID cupboard is full of such red herrings. Another is so-called "irreducible complexity". The eye, we are told, is so complex that removing any single feature from the eye will render it useless, so it must have arisen as a whole - and therefore required a designer. Yet the biological evidence shows that eyes have arisen independently dozens of times in widely different creatures, because the survival value of sensitivity to light is so great that even some sensitivity is better than none at all.

ID clearly has appeal among the scientifically uninformed because it seems intuitively obvious. Yet common sense also tells us that the Sun goes round the Earth. We can see it with our own eyes. For centuries this was so obvious to the Church that our ancestors would have been risking their lives to suggest otherwise. Common sense also tells us that the Earth is flat. But neither common sense nor theology discovered that the Earth is round, or that it orbits the Sun; we owe these discoveries to science. Just as it was science that discovered that all living creatures have evolved through a process of variation and natural selection.

Yet what does ID offer as an alternative explanation to evolution? Nothing at all. ID presents no evidence for its claims and proposes no process to explain how life arose, other than "the intelligent designer did it". Don't ask how he did it because "we have insufficient evidence to speculate". Yet a perfectly natural explanation exists that requires no designer other than natural processes. Wouldn't it actually be simpler to accept the natural, scientific explanation?

IDers have also argued on grounds of fairness and freedom of expression, that schools should "teach the controversy". Perhaps, but not in science class. There is no controversy regarding the facts of evolution among scientists. The facts are established beyond all reasonable doubt. But by all means teach the controversy in Current Affairs or Social Science - as a case study of the way in which well-funded, politically motivated pressure groups can cloud the issues and confuse the public about scientific facts.

Belief in God adds nothing to our knowledge of the Universe. There can be no room in the science classroom for theology, however subtly packaged. Intelligent design? As Laplace might have said: "We have no need of that hypothesis".

Unfortunately simply explaining the overwhelming evidence of evolution will not win the debate - the debate isn't actually about science. The agenda of the IDers is political, and they are using political means to achieve their ends. All they need are a few superficially plausible arguments, endlessly repeated, to persuade a majority of voters that there is something wrong with evolution. And herein lies another problem. In a society where scientific facts are at the mercy of political opinion (as we see in the United States and increasingly in Blair's Britain), that is enough to undermine science itself. The success of Creationism and the ID campaign can be judged by the fact that more American's believe that the Earth has been visited by aliens, or that the "rapture" is near, than believe in evolution.

Homophobia

Those of us whose physical form aligns with our genetic, hormonal and emotional dispositions are the lucky ones. As Jim Herrick, former editor of the New Humanist has said: "Do you think anyone would willingly choose to be gay, given the vicious treatment homosexuals receive from much of society?"

The overwhelming weight of medical evidence points to the fact that there is no "normal" sexual orientation. Human sexuality covers a spectrum from the extreme feminine to the extreme masculine with somewhere in between those of either physical type those who have no interest in sex at all.

Homosexuality is not confined to human beings but is common throughout the animal kingdom. All mammals are known to exhibit homosexual behaviour. Yet so far out of touch with reality is most religious opinion that we have even seen claims that "No Sikh could possibly be a homosexual" and that "Homosexuals should repent".

Within most Christian and Muslim communities homosexuals are still treated with contempt and abuse - even death, because for the devout, holy texts trump scientific knowledge every time.

Unfortunately homophobia is not confined to the devoutly religious. Tabloid journalism - ever ready to exploit the yuk factor - thrives on demonising those who are in any way different.

Sadly, we have seen this lack of understanding even among some Humanists. A new website has just published a "Humanist" manifesto which calls, inter-alia, for denial of equal treatment for homosexuals.

No doubt many "straight" individuals find the idea of homosexuality unpleasant. Some might even have doubts about the idea of "gay rights" if it meant special rights rather than simply equality for gays. But all Humanists surely accept that homosexuals are human, not "subhuman" or "animals", and are fully entitled to respect for their human rights. And Humanists must surely have greater respect for homosexuals than for religious bigots. Religious bigotry, unlike homosexuality, is a matter of choice.

Compiled by Roy Brown