The following passage hit home, made me feel the depth of our problem.
To add to the muddle, it seems that Americans are as ignorant and poorly educated about the particulars of religion as they are about science. A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible. p. 25
We've seen statistics about the bizarre ideas that huge numbers of Americans believe, yet at the same time they're ignorant of where those ideas come from? Oh dear, that's depressing...
The news media tend to cover evolution with the same bogus objectivity that they apply to other "controversies" like the Armageddon scenario. p. 25
Objectivity is under attack. Liberals view intelligent design as not worthy of being discussed as a legitimate option as quoted above. I've noticed some conservatives push this concept further in claiming
judgements are non-controversial. The attitude is something like "Your opinion on the Iraq war is
Objectively Wrong, therefore I'm not going give it serious consideration, it's not worthy."
We could take this one step further and say both sides attack objectivity. Or we might say one side properly insists on objectivity regarding facts while the other attempts to stretch it by applying objectivity to subjective opinions. (Or perhaps both sides stretch this?) Am I onto anything here, or am I babbling?
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Please check out the quote by Bill Moyers on p 29 that starts with "One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. ... " Jacoby comments with "In the land of politicized anti-rationalism, facts are whatever
folks choose to believe."
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Jacoby ends the chapter with two questions regarding our current "intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism".
"The question is why now."
"An equally puzzling question is why
us."
Any thoughts on these two questions, or is it too early to deal with them?