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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.)

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