Tuesday, June 19, 2012

19 June 2012 Teavangelists ban science, biology, geology, climatology, and truth



According to the associated press:
            HB 819 says that only the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission can calculate how fast the sea is rising for state governmental purposes and those calculations must be based on historic trends, which are much lower than the science panel’s projections.
            “The tactics remain the same today as they did centuries ago and it appears despite the lessons of history, Conservatives continue to hold on to the hope that by making facts disappear in a memory hole, the sun will start revolving around the earth, climate change won’t happen and the ocean will not appear in your living room.
            “By smearing the scientists or using time honored intimidation,
Conservatives hope to make scientific discovery that contradicts their version of the bible disappear.”
Cassi Creek:  This pattern of behavior is highly disturbing but not at all unexpected.  The various religions, their associated churches, and other places of worship, have long practiced suppression of scientific information.    
          Priests of all faiths have dangled some form of spiritual reward to those who were content to accept the currently favored dogma.  Those who chose to ignore the mythology and its explanations for why things happen or don’t happen have been threatened with the loss of that spiritual reward.  Particularly recalcitrant opponents of the status quo have suffered more temporal penalties ranging from arrest, isolation, and brutally but skillfully applied pain up to death.  Those individuals who believe that their brutality advances the purpose of some deity are far less likely to be concerned with the long-term spiritual consequences of their actions in a temporal plane. 
          The practice of rearranging the labels on the various disasters so that they comply with the political and spiritual patterns of suppression currently in vogue is as old as civilization.  The ability to manage such Orwellian tactics should have been decreasing in opposition to the access to public education. 
          The Taliban in Afghanistan in concert with other fundamentalist forms of Islam have managed to keep large nations behaving as if they were still in the early Iron Age.  They’ve managed to suppress the practice of all other religions within their borders, as well as music, art, education for females; and to cast such repressive laws in divine right authority governments.
                   The Chassidic cult of Judaism has managed to contain a large Ashkenazic community in practices that began in the Pale of Civilization as widespread repression.  Today, Chassidic Jews, at the most extreme, are still living in a manner that overlays the Diaspora with cults of personality, and the isolation from mainstream society and culture that they brought to the new world with them from the Pale.  Isolation, fear of isolation, and as in other repressive religions in current practice, inability to accept that mythology as explanations for physical events is no longer an acceptable explanation. 
          What is most frightening to me in the instances of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity is the population’s failure to use reason and logic, in concert with scientific observation to replace mythology.  When such failure to learn should be disappearing, huge segments of the U.S. are still following myths, accepting impossible explanations dependent upon magic, and now going so far as to legislate the use of erroneous information in public education. 
          How stupid can a voter pool of U.S. educated adults be?  I’m afraid we may find out before long. 



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