We are not trained to think. In classical education–the kind engaged in by the ancient Greeks and those in later generations who sought to emulate them–the study of learning was nearly as important as the learning itself. Logic was taught, so that the educated could understand where they were apt to be wrong and avoid being so. The intellectual leaders who poured the philosophical foundation upon which the United States of America was built–Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Monroe–were inspired by the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, the rediscovery of whom ended the Dark Ages. Jefferson himself believed no education could be thought complete without a full reading of Homer and Virgil in the original Greek and Latin. Can you imagine such a thing being spoken today, even by a President? The Renaissance (literally "rebirth") was a replanting of the classical spirit of self-discovery, and the Catholic Church–by nurturing the bud back into bloom through patronage–boosted its own prestige but doomed itself to death at the hands of the very tools it had kept safe: reason, education, and art. No church can survive the application of reason, and once its robes are exposed by education as imaginary, art steps in to make us laugh at the nakedness.

The American founders had no respect for the Church, nor for the Protestant denominations which followed it, despite treading carefully so as not to offend them and lose the support of the superstitious people they hoped to elevate. Fortunately (unlike in modern America) they had only to make occasional token gestures to appease the believers, like putting "and nature's god" (originally uncapitalized and clearly a Deist statement, not a religious one) into the Declaration of Independence, because nearly everyone allowed to vote back then was educated. That time was called the Enlightenment, and its leaders were writers and thinkers like Paine, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant–men (and in rare cases, like Mary Wollstonecraft, women) who stood on the very edge of the Dark Ages and held up a light.

Bertrand Russell somewhat-famously said, "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." The men who stood at the edge of that darkness were the doubters; they stood up against centuries of certainty because the truth was more important to them than the comfort of what they already believed. In other words, it didn't matter what felt true, it only mattered what was.

Does Reality Matter Anymore?

Can you imagine such a test being applied to the debate over health care reform?

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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.

So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:

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My Sundance screenplay, All of Creation, featured among its themes the importance of science to understanding our world and finding meaning in it. In fact, the slot I took at the Sundance lab (talked about in this post) was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which advances science and science understanding in the popular media. I've always loved science, but only recently realized that it is under systematic attack by religious fundamentalists posing as scientific thinkers. I still remember watching Inherit the Wind as a kid in the late 1980's, thinking what a great movie it was and how lucky the world was to have outgrown such astounding stupidity as Creationism. It's still one of my favorite films–and favorite plays–but it's since come to my attention that the rabble-rousing inanity has resurged under the laughable sheen of Intelligent Design, or ID for short.

These IDiots, like the obscenely rich coiffed televangelists of our nation, leverage the great wealth they've accumulated from hoodwinked believers and spend it on very professional public-relations efforts to garner public sympathy for opinions which get laughed out of courtrooms and scientific journals because they are so effortlessly demonstrably false.

I've had some success with my screenplay about science, and have begun writing another and have already applied for one grant on its behalf (as documented in this post), so I think I have a certain responsibility to counter this tent-revival of infectious ignorance. I'm going to write about the new farce of a film, Expelled, and to do so I wanted to do a little groundwork to provide one small example of the kind of IDiocy I'll be referring to therein. So here goes my first crack at the debate, in the form of a rebuttal to an excerpt of a piece of ID propaganda:

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