Fantastic Essay about Idiot America

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Fantastic Essay about Idiot America

jblaque has reposted fantastic 2005 essay by Charles P Pierce that was published in Esquire about science vs. religion, intellect vs. gut, enlightenment vs. deliberate ignorance, and the loss of the American Dream to Idiot America called Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Fantastically long, but oh-so-worth-the-read, if only for the insightful punchline at the very end.

All I want to say is: "Yes. What he said."

We desperately need a return to sanity, not to mention a return to science and the enlightened, intellectual, humanistic principles that actually founded the U.S. so badly that hurts.

X-posted on IJ and GJ

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Thanks a lot for linking that. Brilliant read.

Glad you liked it.

Ooh wow. //passes along to T

Glad you liked it.

Urgh. I have recently spent a lot of time on the MSN religion boards, and all of this article is played out in glorious technicolor.

If someone refutes a post with well-researched information, half the time the next post contains exactly what the refuted post said. Most of it deals with Christians being under attack, and the United States being founded on Christian ideals. There's also a horrible amount of bigotry and blatant hatred.

Some of the Christians are articulate and thoughtful, but so many more just scream what they've learned in the Mega-Church (and by screaming I mean all caps and no spell check, and no last minute read-over to make sure it even makes sense.)

I have a Catholic sister and a Jewish sister, both of whom are wonderful people that I love dearly. I don't believe that religion is a bad thing.

Like the geologist in the story, some of my earliest memories are of the space program. That this nation could have fallen so far, so fast, is tragic.

Sorry to rant, but I was just considering this last night. Thanks for posting the link.

I remember there was a Usenet history discussion board I was on, oooooh, something like 10 years ago where someone came in and announced that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation."

Just about everyone jumped on him hard, complete with cites, quotes from the founding fathers themselves, and the existence of the Jeffersonian bible. This guy would not budge, despite the fact that there were at least three dozen people with hardcore evidence backing them up, telling him he was wrong.

By the time it was over, we were all: 1) tools of Satan; 2) going to hell; 3) would get what was coming to us when the U.S. reverted to this guy's mythical "Christian nation."

We laughed him off the Usenet board at the time. It seems so much less funny now and more like a chilling preview of the shitstorm to come.

I don't believe religion is a bad thing, either. But religion is not science of any stripe. Treating religion like can offer scientific answers of any kind is a lot like using Tarot cards to conduct a clinical study: it's not gonna happen. Faith answers different needs and has a different function than facts and figures in the realm of science.

But, yeah...trying to convince someone who uses their religious book as a weapon to put the book down and see reason (and that they don't actually have to throw away the book if they do) is a near impossibility these days.

But that's the entire crux of the thing, isn't it? Once they start discrediting the very idea of scientific proof, once you find yourself backed onto that slippery slope where everyone has a "worldview" or an "agenda" and everything is just opinions and personal beliefs, then you cannot win by logic and rational arguments. And the more that way of thinking spreads, the scarier it gets. Once we start teaching children that rational thought is optional, we're in deep trouble.

(Richard Dawkins had an interesting/terrifying example in his latest book; during the trial against that school in Pennsylvania that wanted to teach creationism a few years ago, the defense attourney argued that as far as he was concerned, the human immune system was created by ~~God~~ an intelligent designer, could never be understood by scientists, and he could see no reason for them to try. That's what they would have taught children. But hey, it's not like we need to educate people to cure cancer and HIV anyway, right?)

(Sorry for ranting.)

But, yeah...trying to convince someone who uses their religious book as a weapon to put the book down and see reason (and that they don't actually have to throw away the book if they do) is a near impossibility these days.

It's not just these days, but always. Look, there's nothing you or anyone else can say that will convince a true, hardcore believer, because anything you might say can be easily refuted just by saying something like "Oh, that's just God testing our faith."

If a religious person doesn't want to, you'll never be able to reason with him/her. And when I mean religious, I mean religious about anything, I'm not just talking religion, sports, cars, computer languages, Buffy's love life, Spike ... :) Luckily, most subjects people get religious about are silly enough that people can agree to remaining civil, but not all of them.

Other than that, can't really comment on it, religion doesn't mix very well with politics over here, most people try and resist it when it happens, and for the most part religion is something not to be taken very seriously.

Might have something to do with the fact that when we Europeans have historically taken religion seriously large quantities of people died so nowadays we're less inclined to do it. Or maybe it's just that we're lucky that we haven't had leaders sucessfully tapping into that segment of the population. Dunno. But it's depressing to think that a country with such large stockpiles of nukular weapons is getting less rational.

http://xxmagex.livejournal.com/92809.html?mode=reply

A somewhat related post about a movie I saw last week when I finally got down to watching the DVD. Thought of you Liz when I saw the part I am talking about.

I think perhaps the Larry King question of "Why are there still monkeys?" hurts the most, because this argument has reached such horrifying levels of hilarious sadness in my heart. I joke of it often, and yet there it is actually coming up in the news as if it were an insightful question.

What Larry King really should have asked is, if Evolution is true...

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/50013/

WHY IS THERE STILL PEANUT BUTTER!?

Again, we're talking about levels of utter sadness that could make a unicorn made of rainbows burst into bitter, hateful tears. It all baffles me, personally. Remember how people used to say to the nerds in school, "Don't worry, someday they'll all be working for you?" They forgot to mention that they still won't vote for you or pay any attention to your ideas, and that you'll still be competing against the evil idiots who have learned how to sucker money out of their even dumber peers.

It seems to me like there used to be some kind of respect for intelligence in this country. Maybe I'm wrong, after all, people as far back as Plato have moaned about the stupidity of the current generation, but the outright hostility towards intellectuals is frightening in the extreme. There are actually people out there specifically targeting intelligence and education, and rather than getting laughed at for being the fools that they are, they have millions of glassy-eyed followers.

It just hurts. It really, really hurts. I fear the unicorns made of rainbows will never be happy again.

I was under the impression that the US was founded by religious extremists, actually. So, not so much a RETURN. But, a halt to the recent backtracking away from, yes.

Look, I'm no fan of Christianity, or any monotheistic religion for that matter, and I too think the spell-checker challenged, all in cap-locks people ought to be laughed at; but I found the article extremely offensive none-the-less. The fellow who wrote it sounds very like the Nazi's, which is no surprise because guess what, the Nazi movement based its tenant's on evolutionism. Biological superiority was what they preached, and that had nothing to do with any religion, and much to do with 'science'. Bad science, sure. But the article was attacking the worst in religion, and holding it up as a representative for all the rest, so I do not apologize. The rule of the elite, the 'smart' people telling everyone else what to think, is scarily like the Nazi belief that suddenly, all blue-eyed, blond-haired people were virtual gods, and everyone else was second class citizens.

Sure, religion (monotheistic religion, let's not forget, which is not religion at its best) spawned the Crusades, and Islam launched its own myriad invasions to convert the world, and countless innocents were slaughtered for no good reason. But remember the Holocaust. Remember Communism, which killed millions in Russia and China. Excuse me, I mean 'liquidated'. Let's not use any brutal words for setting people on fire and watching them burn or lining them up in rows and shooting them in the back of the head. That had nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with 'gut'. The Communists hated all religion, and destroyed it wherever they found it. Their faith (and faith is simply a powerful confidence in a person or a plan, like, say, science) was in science, in the historical dialectic. Nothing to do with religion.

'Science' so-called, and 'intellect' again so-called, have killed more people between them than religion could ever hope to. Airing someone else's dirty laundry and describing it in foul language which conveniently forgetting one's own is, I believe, known as hypocrisy. Charles P Pierce in a nutshell. I'd agree with some of his points, if they weren't couched in hate language that sound like he's a bigot going after Jews or Blacks. But a bigot is what he is, and I not afraid to say it. He puts his faith (oh, that dirty word) in science, and bows down before the altar of intellect. He hears the words of his high priests, the evolutionist scientists (what about the large number of intelligent design and creationism scientists. Hello, anyone?), and takes them as gospel.

As a general rule, I think the Bible sucks, but this quote was so perfect I couldn't resist. "Let him who be without sin, throw the first stone."

Go ahead. Throw them.

Communism has nothing to do with science. It is supposed to be belief in the state. All communist movements have however turned into Cults of Personality, the 2 main ones being the Stalin cult in the USSR and the Mao cult in PRC. If you run the number objectively you'll find that religion or people operating in the name of religion have killed more people throughout history than science.

Okay, this is just my interpretation of the article so YMMV.

In the article, what Charles P Pierce actually seems to be decrying is not religion itself nor is he advocating the sort of science you're referring to. What he seems, at least to my reading of it, to be arguing for is the idea of analytical, objective thinking.

All the examples you list are a result of subjective thinking, the blind faith in an idea because it's easier to let another think for you.

The world he seems to be arguing for and again, it's possible that my interpretation differs from yours, is one where an individual who has devoted years of their life to the study of a subject can express their opinion and have it carry due weight. The problem he points out is that, at the moment, that individual (say a college professor) will go on television to take part in a debate with other people who have no history of interest in the subject and their opinions will carry the same (or more) weight as the professor's.

I didn't see this as an attack on religion, more a commentary on how blind faith, be it in a God or in state-sponsored propaganda, is always a dangerous thing to base a government on.

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