I think I am going to impose my own "litmus test" on future scientific and medical practitioners who have anything to do with my body: if you graduated from this school system or one like it (which includes some school systems in Georgia, Kansas and Ohio), don't touch me unless your actions will be limited to stitching shut a gaping wound or applying defibrillator paddles. If my doctor gets through school while willfully ignoring scientific evidence of evolutionary processes (hellooooooo, anyone seen a domesticated dog today?), I probably don't want her in a position to weigh the variety of options for my medical treatment. (For the one of you who is going to write to me and complain about this attitude, wait until I've had a little more sleep. Perhaps I'll reconsider and apologize, or I'll at least pay lip service to appreciating diverse points of view.)

Anyway, in honor of this Pennsylvania School Board decision, I have searched the far corners of the internet for a document I first read some 15 years ago. I kept a paper copy of it FOREVER (I thought), photocopied it for others, passed it around... But when I went to my collection of cherished articles this afternoon, in order to type it in here, it was gone. But this person has it on his web site (thank you, Thomas Batzler, whoever you are!). I don't know who wrote it originally - perhaps an as-yet undiscovered Priestly Writer? - but it is a work of art:

The Book of Creation

Chapter 1
1
In the beginning God created Dates.
2
And the date was Monday, July 4, 4004 BC.
3
And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Monday, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do.
4
And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.
5
And God saw that he had made many wondrous things, but that he had not wherein to put it all. And God said, Let the heavens be divided from the earth; and let us bury all of these Things which we have made in the earth; but not too deep.
6
And God buried all the Things which he had made, and that was that.
7
And the morning and the evening and the overtime were Tuesday.
8
And God said, Let there be water; and let the dry land appear; and that was that.
9
And God called the dry land Real Estate; and the water called he the Sea. And in the land and beneath it put he crude oil, grades one through six; and natural gas put he thereunder, and prehistoric carboniferous forests yielding anthracite and other ligneous matter; and all these called he Resources; and he made them Abundant.
10
And likewise all that was in the sea, even unto two hundred miles from the dry land, called he resources; all that was therein, like manganese nodules, for instance.
11
And the morning unto the evening had been a long day; which he called Wednesday.
12
And God said, Let the earth bring forth abundantly every moving creature I can think of, with or without backbones, with or without wings or feet, or fins or claws, vestigial limbs and all, right now; and let each one be of a separate species. For lo, I can make whatsoever I like, whensoever I like.
13
And the earth brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, with and without backbones, with and without wings and feet and fins and claws, vestigial limbs and all, from bugs to brontosauruses.
14
But God blessed them all, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and Evolve Not.
15
And God looked upon the species he hath made, and saw that the earth was exceedingly crowded, and he said unto them, Let each species compete for what it needed; for Healthy Competition is My Law. And the species competeth amongst themselves, the cattle and the creeping things; and some madeth it and some didn't; and the dogs ate the dinosaurs and God was pleased.
16
And God took the bones from the dinosaurs, and caused them to appear mighty old; and cast he them about the land and the sea. And he took every tiny creature that had not madeth it, and caused them to become fossils; and cast he them about likewise.
17
And just to put matters beyond the valley of the shadow of a doubt God created carbon dating. And this is the origin of species.
18
And in the Evening of the day which was Thursday, God saw that he had put in another good day's work.
19
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, which is tall and well-formed and pale of hue: and let us also make monkeys, which resembleth us not in any wise, but are short and ill-formed and hairy. And God added, Let man have dominion over the monkeys and the fowl of the air and every species, endangered or otherwise.
20
So God created Man in His own image; tall and well-formed and pale of hue created He him, and nothing at all like the monkeys.
21
And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth. But ye shalt not smoketh it, lest it giveth you ideas.
22
And to every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air I have given also every green herb, and to them it shall be for meat. But they shall be for you. And the Lord God your Host suggesteth that the flesh of cattle goeth well with that of the fin and the claw; thus shall Surf be wedded unto Turf.
23
And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.
24
And the evening of the fifth day, which had been the roughest day yet, God said, Thank me it's Friday. And God made the weekend.

(There are two more chapters...)