He Ain't Stupid, He's My Senator

Children are programmed from birth to believe what adults tell them. When we think about it, it makes perfect sense. For example if we could go back say, 100,000 years, we would undoubtedly find parents who cautioned their children not to swim in a particular place in a river, or not eat those pretty little red berries. Children who paid no attention would quickly have been  removed from the gene pool because they would have become a meal for a crocodile or died of poisoning. This is just one example of Darwin’s idea of natural selection at work.

Valuable as the trait is for survival of our species, its a two-edged sword.  Once beliefs are implanted into the heads of children whose brains have not yet developed enough for critical thinking; whether right or wrong, those beliefs are next to impossible to dislodge after they become adults.  Understanding this gives us insight into how otherwise perfectly sane and intelligent adults are unable to dislodge beliefs implanted in their heads when they were children.

Consider, for example the 533 members of the 112^th Congress. (Two house seats are vacant as of this writing) Whatever you might think of these men and women (and with a 10% approval rating, I can fairly guess what you think) one thing we know is that they are not stupid. Many of them have graduated from our most prestigious Universities. 

But consider this. Fifteen members, including prominent members such as Harry Reid, present leader of the Senate and former leader, Orrin Hatch, are convinced that their founding prophet, Joseph Smith was visited by an angel named Moroni.  Romney, who wants desperately to become our next POTUS, also is a firm believer.  They all believe that an angel named Moroni directed Smith to some golden plates inscribed in a lost Egyptian language which Smith was able to decipher using some magic reading stones which were conveniently buried with the plates. They believe that Jesus is coming back but that he will touch down in Jackson County MO.   The latest figures available (2011) reveal that there are 6,144,582 Mormons (2%) of Americans whose brains have been indoctrinated with this foolishness, while 306,687,418 (98%) of us are convinced the whole thing is hogwash.   

There is absolutely no way 15 LDS members of our 112th Congress could believe something so patently outrageous unless it was planted in their heads by adults when they were children.

If religion made any sense we wouldn’t have, according to Pew Research, over 30,000 different forms of belief systems. And that’s just those who call themselves Christians. How many “believers” are aware that only 33% of our planet’s population call themselves Christians? Nearly 5 billion reject Christianity outright. And of the 33% that buy the myth that dead people come back alive, a virgin got pregnant and Jesus comes in handy wafer form, most of them believe all the other Christians are going to hell because they don’t practice the “right” form of Christianity. Catholics think Baptists are going to hell, Baptists think Catholics are going to hell and Church of Christ members think they are both going to hell, while Mormons busily baptize them all (even Jewish Holocaust victims) out of hell after they have died.

As Richard Dawkins put it….barking mad.

Filling the heads of children with un-falsifiable claims just because it makes you feel good is no better than not caring where your money comes from as long as you have it.

As I have written before, there are two types of ignorance; the regular kind and the willful kind. Thinking of the two Catholic Republican candidates and to reinforce my statement that these folks aren’t stupid, they certainly are not afflicted with the regular kind but I'll give you ten to one odds they suffer from the second kind.