Skip to main content

Invincible Ignorance: Science from Hell


It is a fact that Congressman Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, looks just like an ordinary person, but we are not to be fooled by facts.  Congressman Broun is the Oldest Man in the World.  He walks up and down on the earth, going to and fro on it, and that is amazing, given that his head is about three thousand years old.  He has a recent haircut--and a neat and careful one it is, too--but the contents of his head are truly and amazingly ancient.  You get a clue about that when he talks.  

Just last week, the Oldest Man in the World said that evolution and the big bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of Hell".  "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.  It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior."

I don't remember that part of my biology and chemistry classes, but apparently they conclude, "Thus and Begorra:  you don't need a savior!"  But I was naive:  I thought it was about learning from the evidence that the universe is billions of years old, with enough time to try almost everything, and that life earth and squirmy worms were wondrously interesting.  It wasn't:  it was straight from the pit of Hell.  

As Representative Broun says, "I don't believe that the earth's but about 9,000 years old.  I believe it was created in six days as we know them.  That's what the Bible says."  That's what NBC says Mr Broun says.  (Don't get all tangled up in Mr. Broun's King James English:
that "I don't believe the earths but about" business means he believes that the earth was created about the time the city of Jericho was founded and when people first tiptoed through the bogs of Denmark.  

Dr. Broun is a medical doctor, and together with Representative Todd Akin--the "legitimate rape won't get you pregnant" man, they sit on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Space and Technology.  Well, it says right in the Bible or Somewhere that there will be tribulations on the earth before Big Bird is crucified and Jesus comes again.  

To take Todd Akin out of context, there ought to be "ways to try to shut that whole thing down".  It is shameful and embarrassing to have people as ignorant of science as those two in charge of science and technology.  

They are not really lying.  They are ignorant.  Simply ignorant.  Catholic theology has a term for the kind of ignorance one cannot be held responsible for.  They call it, "invincible ignorance".  Science from Hell.

Comments

  1. Too bad these folks don't know how to read their Bibles. In any case, they are too ignorant to know that either. John S.

    ReplyDelete

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

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. ...

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...