I've just found a brilliant new article on the problem of Intelligent Design written by Pat Shipman, give it a read it's really good.

Teach both

Somebody sent me an e-mail last week asking why I care about the advancement of ID in the United States, sure I'm in Europe and I could never see anything like this being considered, let alone implemented here in the near future. But that's not the point. The point is I believe in materialism, we live in natural material world that can be measured and understood - we do not live in a super-natural world with lots of strange things going on that we have no hope of ever understanding. Scientific materialism is the whole basis of modern human society - its what allowed us to put spacecraft in orbit of other planets, it allows us to fight disease, it allows us to create this international network allowing this very message to be read everywhere in the world. If you take away materialism we're no better then cavemen - in fact we'd probably be worse.

Any attacks upon materialism should not be tolerated, evolution isn't "just a theory" it's scientific fact, just as much as we know carbon at high-enough temperatures will react with oxygen causing fire, it's backed up by one hundred and fifty years worth of constant testing, re-testing. We can see evolution happening in the lab, we can see evolution in large scales by looking at the fossil record.

The religious-right should be put where they belong - in the rubbish bin - they're only capable of destruction and harm to the human species.