Sorry Lindos...didnt answer all your points:
1) Are US citizens stupid?
Well that isnt actually a very contentious issue at all. Compared to Europeans the answer is YES. Consistently the US lags way behind in educational league tables..... so badly the US started throwing in Mexico to make sure they werent Back O The Bus all on their ownio.
Here the explaination is simple: In Europe educational standards are decided by centralised government departments, usually employing panels of education experts and experts in their individual fields. The public education system is therefore pretty standard, as are educational standards across Europe. A recent example here is that the EU recently issued a decree banning the teaching of any form of Creationism teaching except in RE class. Why? because its superstitious nonsense that defys 150+ years of hard scientific evidence. Its faith, and is classed as such.
Over in La La Land they decide what kids learn on a district by district/state basis. The decisions are made by School Boards, and the people who get elected onto those boards are idiot members of the public with no qualifications. The Texas School Board for example....not ONE qualified educator on the board. That is common across all the system. It gets further compromised by allowing preachers to sit on these panels, despite a stated separation of church and state, and allowing home schooler parents whose kids are NOT in the system to determine what other kids get to learn. Its democratic education - education by conscensus. As a result their kids educations are used as political footballs by the religious right, as the recent Texas School Board and Louisiana School Board scandals have shown. Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller ... l_District for a summary) is just one in a long ongoing list of stupid court cases that are the result. In the US they have spent 80 years trying hard to get Creationism taught as Biology 101.
Teaching kids about magic talking snakes in biology class, and a culture where EVERY opinion has equal weight whether uninformed or not, makes for a society that is over credible and vulnerable to snake oil salesmen, whether they sell magic oil, magic cloths, or pyramid Ponsi schemes.
2) Do they believe this nonsense?
Well obviously yes. Look at the amount of untaxed revenue these snake oil selling scum rake in every year via their filthy childish con tricks and mega churches.
Look at the faiths they espouse.
Not the staid and fusty faiths of old Europa for them....no, the happy clappy rock n roll heretical filth of Evangelical faiths. Snake dancing preachers, talking in tongues....signs and wonders. Magic tricks, shell games and scams to separate the hysterical opium deluded masses from their bucks. Christianity at its most ridiculous, childish format spiced with end times fear and loathing and a good dose of "we are better than them" bigotry and blind self rightiousness. Idiotic literalist nonsense for a stupid non reasoning flock.
When over 50% of your population sincerely believes that the earth is just 6000 years old, that God Did It is always the answer to hard questions such as how we got here, and the Flintstones was in fact a documentary series..... what the hell do you expect?
And when you blindly defend a constituted freedom, without realising the responsibilities of that freedom and regulating it with moderation, and ignore the very apparent evidence of its corrosive effect on your society....
...
you damn well deserve to choke to death on those pretzels....and on the way provide a barrel o belly laughs for people like me
"Science flew men to the moon. Religion flew men into buildings."
"To sin by silence makes cowards of men."
