"It's amazing how if you tell someone a lie over and over and over eventually they start to believe it"
You are a Bible literalist. This is what the entire universe is, as far as you - via your literal 'belief' in the Bible - are concerned*:
image
"If you look around, it's everywhere. And because it's everywhere, people just believe it must be true."
The irony of what you say isn't lost on you, nosiree! [/hyper-sarcasm]. But then, you live in a part of the US where sarcasm & irony are alien concepts. No wonder then, that many in the US didn't get "Monty Python's Flying Circus", least of all 'The Piranha Brothers' (as in Doug Piranha).
"Today I was looking on the back of a package of those glow in the dark stars that you stick on your ceiling (stocking stuffer for my son), and it had a whole paragraph about the big bang! And how having these stars is like looking back in time to the beginning of the world."
I refer you to the above pic. If the rest of the US's scientific establishment thought as you do, the notion of the USSR landing men on the moon first would've been the least of your problems. And people in the US crapped themselves on that day in 1957 when Sputnik-1 was sent up. Methinks not purely for what that represented at the time - the potential militarisation of space itself - but the fact that Atheist Soviet science had, at a stroke, completely annihilated the above previously (at that time) undisputed model of the universe.
PROTIP: Said Biblical model of the entire universe. We now know that the stars are many light-years away; but you probably still think they're merely lights in a solid 'dome', resting on a flat Earth with corners, which itself rests on pillars. The likes of John Glenn, Dr. Buzz Aldrin et al would like a word with you lot on Ruptured Retards. Never mind what Dr. Aldrin did to a journalist who once questioned his landing on the moon, I daren't imagine what Gen. Chuck Yeager would do to you - and he nearly killed himself getting as near as dammit to space in a Lockheed Starfighter.
"It's amazing how much it's drilled into our kids' heads. And so subtely sometimes most people don't even notice it."
I refer you to your previous words:
"if you tell someone a lie over and over and over eventually they start to believe it"
And how they're as near as dammit to those of Joseph Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it"
He was Hitler's Propaganda Minister. If not for another Nazi, Werhner von Braun, you wouldn't have had the vehicles to send the nuclear devices to deter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Guess where they got their own scientific knowhow to be able to send up Sputnik-1, as well as their own nuclear warheads? von Braun wasn't the only Nazi rocket scientist out there, you know.
The 'lie' about the Big Bang and astronomy as a whole, is what got you to your current solo superpower status today - and not via outdoing the USSR in the Arms Race. Science has got you to where you are today, certainly the internet as you know it today. A certain scientist had, as far back as 1945 (even having a letter explaining such - with diagrams etc - printed in an electronics hobbyists magazine then), conceived of electronic devices placed in orbit, to relay radio communications/signals to other parts of the world. That scientist was Arthur C. Clarke.
When Telstar - the first telecommunications satellite - was developed & sent up in 1961, guess who was the senior technical advisor to the project?
Arthur C. Clarke was British.
Like I say: the internet relies greatly on telecommunications satellites.
The internet as we know it today - the WWW - was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Who is British.
Which country has never relied on a law to ensure religion will never influence the school curriculum, via the introduction of the National Curriculum, which makes teaching Evolution & the Big Bang as fact compulsory - even in homeschooling, to say nothing of 'faith schools', if they're to continue to receive state funding? Britain. No Kitzmiller vs. Dover required.
China today? A case of 'In Soviet China, God worships you'. Their Shenzhou missions. Yang Liwei. Zhai Zhigang. They have ambitions to land on the moon.
The Catholic Church admits that the 'Creation' story is purely fable (as the Church of England easily reconcile their doctrine with now proven scientific fact. They even embraced Darwin's new thinking in "On the Origin of Species" when it was first published), and that the Big Bang is reality.
Hitler was a Catholic.
Think about that. Especially before you watch the film "Iron Sky". Certainly after the first five minutes.
Moral: You should be saying 'Thank FUCK that NASA/JPL, MIT etc are mapping the universe, and proving the Big Bang is fact!'. Your country's very existence today - as in not just post-WWII - depended on it.
*- And if you say 'That's just fable & metaphor', then you've just moved the goalposts, and not just to avoid the question. Either it is literal or you've contradicted yourself, and admitted that the 'Word of God' is lies, and you agree that the Big Bang is fact. No 'interpretation' nor Bible 'apologetics' allowed. Either it is literal (which scientific fact, and the likes of Aldrin, Glenn, Tereshkova, Leonov, Liwei & Zhigang, will challenge you to prove them & their experiences wrong), or it isn't.
And, as a Bible literalist, the phrase 'Burden of Proof' will make you want to recant your 'faith', and become an Atheist, like a shot. After all, if Reality is a lie, then try to post on Ruptured Retards via the power of prayer alone. A space scientist (Clarke) ensured you could connect to the internet. Just as another scientist (Berners-Lee) ensured your using of such is as easy as possible. To say nothing of another scientist - an Atheist & homosexual (Alan Turing) - who developed what would become the very thing you need to connect to the internet in the first place.
The first digital computer he helped create? Colossus. At Bletchley Park in Britain, during WWII. Another digital computer was being developed, that was built sometime after Colossus: Z1.
In Germany.
--EDIT--
@Philbert McAdamia
Yes, that is a cardboard cutout of Dumbya (possessing infinitely more intelligence, charm, and charisma than the original! X3 ). And there's me thinking that - according to their precious 'Ten Commandments' that these Religious Reich types want outside all US courtrooms (and to replace the US Constitution with, natch) - they weren't allowed any other gods, nor worship any graven images...?
But hey, that's said Religious Reich for you: cherrypick from their precious 'Word of 'God', because they have no choice but to do so - or become Unutarian Universalists, perish the thought! [/hyper-sarcasm]. Also, hypocrisy is hardwired into their DNA.