Skip to main content

Invincible Ignorance

In a show of hands, a number of Republican Presidential candidates indicated they did not believe in evolution.  Others waffled.


How can this be?  Is this not the 21st century!  It used to be!


With only reluctant exception, the candidates also say they do not believe that human activity has anything important to do with climate change.  If every Nobel Prize winner in Economics said that this is the time for governments to borrow a lot of money and provide jobs for millions of people--as FDR once did--the Republican Presidential aspirants would say, "No!"; that governments are the problem, and that government jobs (police, fire, parks, roads, regulations, food safety, the military, etc.) are not real jobs.  


The earth is flat.  There was a flood over all the earth.  Jesus is coming on a cloud to drill for oil in the Everglades.  The Bible is a road atlas, and God told Michele Bachmann to run for office, and for Mitt Romney to wear special underwear.  Rick Perry is John the Baptist in boots.


"Science says the earth is billions of years old," they say, "but God says, right here in the Bible, on page 1, that. . . ."  Their audiences cheer for executions in Texas by the hundreds, for denying health care to anyone who cannot, or has not, paid for it, and for water-boarding suspects.  


They believe that ancient mythology should be taught in our public schools as an alternative to what we know is true:  i.e., that the universe is very old, it is evolving, and CO2 emissions are raising hell with the global climate.  


If those people have their way, Republicans will become a party in defense of ignorance.  Deliberate ignorance.  Arrogant ignorance.  Dangerous ignorance.  


I don't really care whether Michele Bachmann is happy to have Marcus as the head of their household, but HPV vaccinations do not cause mental retardation.  I don't care whether Mitt Romney thinks an angel landed on a hill in New York, or whether Rick Perry thinks the earth was created in six days, nor do I care that John McCain wets a finger to gauge the wind before he decides whether evolution is real.  I do care that they are willing to deny the best of what we know to be true.


Catholics have a marvelous medieval term:  invincible ignorance.  

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