Skip to main content

How to Get to Congress, or Heaven, or Not


How can anybody, alive in the 20th or 21st century, vote for anybody who seriously believes that the big bang or evolution are "lies straight from the pit of Hell"?  

 That's what Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia believes.  
To vote for people like Paul Broun is like voting for ignorance; like voting for dirt floors, or sailing off the edge of earth if you go too far west.  It is like believing that demons cause diarrhea, and that the cure is to sacrifice a chicken.  

 (Well, I gave that argument away, didn't I:  demons do cause diarrhea.)

How can people, whatever their religion or politics, deny things we know?  Science is a rigorous system for finding and refining what we know.  Even if you think we have the right to believe in tooth fairies if we want to, because they are harmless, or in goblins and gremlins and good fairies, just for fun, no sensible, sane person thinks it is rational to deny what we know.  

 Politicians do.  Tea Party politicians do.  Some religious people do.  Ignoramuses do.  Some of our ancestors did.  Maybe chickens do, and that is why sacrificing one to cure diarrhea makes sense.  But none of that is rational.  Believing stupid stuff like that ought to cause sensible people to line up for days before an election to insure that people who believe nonsense like that never get into office, never get to write laws, never get to spend our money or send our children into war.  

 I quit going to church because I came to the conclusion that there was a snowball's chance in Hell that the church would give up talking about a three-storied universe, or Heaven in the sky or Hell under the dirt, populated with "ghosties and ghoulies and three-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night".  

 (O.K., "things that go bump in the night" was almost enough to keep me in house.)

It is intellectual suicide to deny what seems to be true.  It is like volunteering to take a turn at being the Village Idiot.  It is a kind of madness.

 It is like knowing that race is just a clan or tribal designation, or a hair color or blue or brown eyes, but deciding to allow slavery, anyway, just to get along.  It is like knowing that your wife is both better looking and smarter than you are, but agreeing that she should not be allowed to vote.  It is like pretending that you are not attracted to a beautiful woman, and that if you chose to, you could feel the same way about a man.  Or visa versa.  

 It is shameful to go through life deliberately choosing to be an ignoramus, even if it is the only way you can get to Congress.  Or to heaven.  

 (There!  I did it, again.  There is no other way to get to Heaven, if you don't believe it.)

(You might find that a comfort.)

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

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
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.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more