...and 51% believe fairy tales are real.
US public opinion is also extremely hostile to Darwinian theory. In a national poll two months ago, 51% of Americans said they believed that human beings were created by God. Another 30% said God guided human evolution, and only 15% thought that humans had evolved without divine intervention.
Nick covered some of this in his recent blog entry. Mine is more of a call to arms.
There needs to be a massive campaign against ignorance in the United States those 15% of Americans whose brains are working need to fill the minds of everyone else with knowledge and lots of it, they're not getting it from school, they're definitely not getting it from private media, so they need to get it from you guys! Society as a whole need to educate itself.
People need to arrange community meetings based on education on a neighbourhood level where they can discuss these things, and the 15% need to come armed with knowledge to fill the minds of the rest, with a tool like the internet there is now no excuse for ignorance.
The private media no longer have a monopoly on information. You just need to drag the people away from the rubbish spouted by the opinionists on Fox News and CNN and whatever other crap there is. Neighbourhood educational meetings would be a great way to tackle this.
With a correct strategy and implementation religion and other imaginary nonsense could just be a bad memory within a generation in the United States and it would finally enter the 20th century (no that's not a typo).