[Mb-civic] [ HuffingtonPost.com ] Recommendation: The Politics of Ignorance

[Alexander Harper]

The writer is spot on. This muddling together of "Mythos" and "Logos" has
always led to catastrophe, throughout history. Logos can never
adequately explain Mythos and Mythos should never be used to justify
Logos. The two are absolutely necessary for  healthy human existence
but should absolutely be kept separate. It is a source of despair to me
that those in charge of the world's only hyper-power either have no
inkling of this eternal truth or are wilfully choosing to ignore it.

Al Baraka

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: michael at intrafi.com
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
  Subject: [Mb-civic] [ HuffingtonPost.com ] Recommendation: The
  Politics of Ignorance
  Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 14:02:59 -0500

  The Huffington Post

  michael at intrafi.com has sent you a link!

  Sam Harris: The Politics of Ignorance

  Link:
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/sam-harris/the-politics-of-ignorance_5053.html

  President Bush has now endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of
  "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate
  alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he
  has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of
  evolution. But the jury is not out -- indeed it was well in before
  President Bush was even born -- and anyone familiar with modern
  biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and
  religious advocacy masquerading as science.

  It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided
  on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID
  "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that
  such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the
  innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now
  spilling out.

  According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are
  certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty
  years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This
  is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more,
  who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the
  Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological
  fact of evolution. As the President is well aware, believers of this
  sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the
  American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now
  influence almost every decision of national importance. Political
  liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments
  and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate
  themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote
  mainly on the basis of religious dogma. More than 50 percent of
  Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view o! f people who
  do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential
  candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to
  criticize a person’s religious beliefs, political debate over
  questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of
  assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay
  marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a
  theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States -- in our
  schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
  Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe
  in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and
  belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire
  world.

  It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed
  that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no
  question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins
  and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the
  accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise,
  Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served
  only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there
  is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular,
  there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of
  a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises
  homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed
  on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims
  of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether
  science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God. There are
  an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that s! cience could not "rule
  out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is
  whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that
  religious dogmatists believe -- that God exists and takes an interest
  in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at
  the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the
  moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to
  believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light
  under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

  Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in
  these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a
  dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful
  Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence
  "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and
  we know that Apollo is not neutral between them." Clearly, the
  commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many
  of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate
  to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what
  words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to
  him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are
  positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White
  House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study
  cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it
  troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

  The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one
  another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their
  beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument
  will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable
  people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable
  are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized
  that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all
  real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

  © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com, LLC

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