Harming Ourselves Through Denial and Invention of Reality

CARL SAGAN ONCE SAID that there is no shortage of intelligence in America, but there is a shortage of knowledge, by which he meant, a shortage of people with a good, fundamentally sound scientific education. And when you consider the number of Americans who don't believe in climate change, evolution, or modern medicine, you begin to understand what the late planetary astronomer meant. Recent polls indicate that the percentage of people who do not believe in scientific, factual reality is decreasing over the years; but only gradually. Too gradually. close to half of republicans still deny climate change, decades after it s reality became obvious, years after the scientific community began to uniformly tell us that the research is in, the tests have been done, and climate change, tragically, stands up under the closets possible scrutiny. This widespread, societal-wide refusal to accept the truth, while inventing false "truths" with which to replace the facts, is alarming at best, suicidal at worst. According to Noam Chomsky, the republican party is the single most dangerous organization in human history, precisely because their policies, based on its members beliefs, are leading humanity directly down the road to destruction. One survey revealed that fifty eight percent of republicans consider higher education to be harmful to the United States. Their contempt for education shows in their values and values and beliefs, and, ironically, it is this very contempt for knowledge and education which results in large scale benightedness among American conservatives. The same people tend to form a distinguishable class of people who refuse to believe in reality, and instead replace reality with their own brand of fiction. Thus, they embrace beliefs like" climate change is a deliberate liberal hoax. Humans did not evolved in Earth in the process of natural selection, but were created quickly by an all powerful human -like living being. Giving tax advantages to the wealthy helps poor people. Our mistakes are forgiven by this harsh biblical deity only when people who make mistakes worship a person who was tortured to death in payment for these mistakes. Like Sagan said, a little education, or maybe a lot of education, in basic, verifiable reality never hurt anyone.