A Disturbing Speculation

There's a plausible speculation that modern science and economic growth was set off by literalism. Does this mean that the fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of religious texts are not actually idiots?

On the other hand, those religious texts were written when every copy required the skin of slaughtered animals and somebody to develop writer's cramp. It was easier to write things in a compressed manner (remember that the better the compression scheme, the more the compressed data resembles random noise) and pay a corps of explainers to get the data into other people's heads.

On the gripping hand, it can be a grave mistake to treat compressed data as though it were uncompressed.