Ardi the missing link to evolution?

Have you heard of Ardi?  Better known as Ardipithecus, is another missing link of human evolution possibly answering the age old Darwinian question; If humans did not evolve out of apes/chimps, then how can evolution be a viable concept?  Ardi, a 4-6 million year fossil shows a human ancestor with two anatomical mysteries impossible to ignore.  Ardi has significantly reduced canines, teeth substantially smaller than a chimp, but far more importantly, Ardi is a bipedal!  Bipedal-ism is a trait only available to humans and an evolutionary development that pushed human development forward. This discovery is yet another nail in the coffin of religious sentiment and control of social agenda. 

Advocating creationism in the face of mounting evidence will become increasingly more difficult and will start silencing anti-evolutionary religious advocacy.  While religion in general has been slipping due to it's inability to explain life's mysteries there still exist powerful factions and pockets of humanity that cling on to aspects science has been unable to explain.  Religion is an important and useful tool in providing personal and moral guidance, but it has also been incorrectly abused in the field of politics even in a country where freedom of religion is supposedly a cornerstone of democracy.  Despite this separation an idea that we humans were established by our Creator and therefore endowed with certain inalienable rights no longer makes sense.  Whatever inalienable rights humans achieve are those bestowed upon us by a collective agreement, a concept both wondrous and fraught with dangers.  Rights governed by humans are liable to change just as opinions and thoughts of all people are subject to change.  Still, the matter of capital punishment and abortion become purely a matter of collective agreement because our creation is not a product of a creator and our death should no longer concern "this creator".  This however leads to a further and more significant problem.

Religion's ability to explain some of the world's "miraculous" manifestations has been shrinking for thousands of years.  Lightening, waves, stars, volcanoes, human emotion, plagues, famine and rainbows once easily explained as products of deities, now can be explained by 5th graders schooled in basic knowledge.  An inability to use religion as a means of explaining the world to an educated society has drastically changed religion's role and ushered in agnosticism/atheism at a rapid speed.  In an effort to maintain a semblance of control, religion has turned to pockets of human development that science struggles to explain.  Evolution was one such example used to downplay evolution and argue the existence of god and god's accomplishments.  As evolution is accepted, religious advocates will continue undermining and debunking advances in science that threaten to wrestle control of religious thought.  In fact Ardi's existence will not deter those advocating creationism because beliefs rooted in emotion are hard to dislodge.  Still, more focus instead will be applied toward the creation of the planets, solar systems and even such abstract concepts as 'space'.  Religion will continue to grasp for the less tangible in order to continue it's control over humanity by simply asking impossible to answer question like "where does space come from" or "what caused the big bang then?".

Ardi is a fantastic development, both in terms of science's ability to discover such wonder and as an answer to many of us not satisfied with religion's explanations.