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

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. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

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