Missing Link?

This is a letter written in response to a scathing and monumentally  stupid letter in the local rag. The original writer was  critical of the teaching of (oxymoron alert!) "Creation Science" in public schools. The respondent, whose letter I found to be an unintelligible, rambling apologia for Fundamentalism,  then spouted a litany of statements which he obviously believed, which were so far out in left field as to be in another postal zip code.  The letter is my response to some ,  but by no means all, of the more ludicrous propositions made and are somewhat truncated, due to the 300 word limit imposed for op-ed letters.   

       A recent letter urged the teaching of "creationism" as factual and caustically derided an earlier writer who was critical of teaching belief as science. It would be difficult to cram more inaccuracies and downright fallacies into a letter than this second writer managed to do. for brevity I'll use bullets, as  my statements are rebuttals to the points alluded to in the pro-creationism letter:

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       Yes, unlike creatures do breed, lions can and do mate with tigers, given the opportunity, horses mate with donkeys, producing jackasses(!!). Recent mitochondrial  DNA regression shows that many humans  have some Neanderthal DNA intermixed with their Cro-Magnon DNA of modern man.

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      No educated and literate  person uses the term "missing link" today. In 1859,  when Darwin first published, the fossil record was poorly known. Without transitional fossils,   Darwin  described the available information as showing patterns that followed from his theory of descent with modification through natural selection. However, only two years later, Archaeopteryx, a classic transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, was discovered. Many more transitional fossils have been discovered since, and there is now abundant evidence that all classes of vertebrates are related, much of it in the form of transitional fossils.

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      Truth and belief are different concepts. Note that essentially every civilization has its version of "how we got here." Of course, all others are Creation "myths" but the Biblical version is the real deal. Right. .

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      Belief isn't based on rational thought, and attempts to make it so are pathetic.

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      Finally, the writer speaks of the earlier writer's "religion of atheism" The depths of ignorance are obvious in that one phrase, as atheism isn't a religion and can't be "taught" if one wanted to. Comparing  Evolutionary theory with atheism or Creationism takes ignorance to a whole new level.