Today’s conservative movement has a zeal for ideology that
is fueled by unlearning basic facts and knowledge of math, science, geography
and reality. All too well these
political fundamentalists reject reason, facts, logic, wisdom and knowledge to keep
their sentient-based mindset/constituency. This summarizes their zealous
attitude and its result: despite their commitment, they feel established in their
own righteousness.
Spurting out verbal rubbish you know nothing about is traditionally
considered unwise at best. But ignorance has started to become less a handicap,
and even a sense of pride! One being
belligerently ignorant is now offended if anyone dare suggest ignorance is less
desirable than knowledge in the face of expertise.
With a great deal of zeal, they go about thinking and saying
they are serving God and country, but all they do is produce their own set of
standards or realities. Their zeal is probably their greatest barrier to the
truth and to justice.
More importantly, it prevents them from objectively serving
the ‘common good,’ i.e., the very American system and tradition they zealously try
to revise in their own image and likeness by embracing ignorance as a virtue. Their
minds are blinded by zeal, not served by it.
Frederic Bastiat said, "When plunder becomes a way of
life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves
in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that
glorifies it." I finally realize
why we need 35 million laws to keep the 10 commandments.
We obsess about homeland security, ‘enemies’ all around us and
threats to our way of life. But America
will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be
because we destroyed ourselves by not seeing truth within instead of taking a contemptuous
view of reality and growing proudly ignorant day by day.
Ignorance is not the equivalent of expertise nor is wishful
thinking and unblinking prejudice the same as evidence and reason.
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