Skip to main content

Invincible Ignorance

In the fine and fantastic logic of the medieval church,
the term invincible ignorance referred to circumstances
beyond the control of people that left them hopelessly ignorant,
and that, in some cases, was a fine thing! For instance,
if a person, never in his life, had ever heard that Jesus
was available to save his ordinary, miserable arse,
then God could not hold him responsible for not being a Christian.
See? Hopelessly ignorant; not to be held responsible!

The doctrine of invincible ignorance is being put to new use.
Here! Let me count a few of the ways:

A Daily Kos/Research poll found that 28% of Republicans
do not believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Another 30% are "not sure". That his birth certificate is on file,
and that a Hawaiian newspaper, at the time of his birth, noted it
is entirely beside the point. They don't believe it!

Charles M. Blow, in a N.Y. Times op ed tells more:

Last summer, a Gallup poll said that six of every ten Republicans
believe that humans were created about ten thousand years ago,
in their present form. In spite of mountains of evidence for
the universe being 13 or 14 billion years old, of the earth being
about 4.6 billion years old, and human life being millions of years old,
some people actually believe, in spite of all the facts,
that God created the earth and everything on it about the time
of the last glaciation over North America; maybe even later.

There is a reason why only six percent of scientists
call themselves Republican. Invincible ignorance
is not a scientific virtue. It is a political fact.

It is a fact that the universe is incredibly old.
It is a fact that life in that universe has evolved.
It is a fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.
And invincible ignorance is a fact.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more