“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.
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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