In the Future

You’re probably familiar with the myth. There’s a good chance you grew up being taught about it. The story goes that Christopher Columbus was a man of vision, a deep thinker who was the one person who understood that the world was not flat, that he could make it to the Indies over the sea. All the Europeans, their minds still addled from the Dark Ages, laughed heartily and called him a fool, for, after all, they were still convinced that he would fall off the edge of the earth.

We now know this was not true (let alone that myth about him “discovering” anything at all). The educated classes well understood that the earth was round; only the truly ignorant, those who could not read, still thought otherwise.

What kind of myths will parents and teachers be telling their children 500 years from now? That all Americans believed that the earth is less than 10,000 years old? That all modern animals came from ancestors that were rescued from a worldwide flood of which there remains no tangible proof? And the real coup de grace that we were created by… well, something, that left no trace of itself and may have actually planted misleading evidence to throw its own creation of its scent.

Now not everybody believes this nonsense, of course, not even a majority. But, damn, are they loud enough to be a majority. We’re already seeing America becoming defined by this kind of “thought” in how foreign nations derisively condemn supposed fervent anti-intellectualism and supposedly systemic religious fundamentalism.

And that’s not to say that all religious people are necessarily like this. There are millions of enlightened believers who understand simple concepts like “metaphor” or that the Bible may not be the actual word of God, having been filtered through the minds of men (does God hate women, or just the people who actually wrote the Bible?).

Something has clearly taken a horrible turn (a right turn, by the way) in our culture for this kind of thinking to not only exist but actually be on the rise. Some like to say that it’s okay, it’s their right to hold such beliefs, and who are we educated folk to call their beliefs wrong? That’s the equivalent of me holding a belief that president Bush has been the most effective emperor in Djibouti’s history; you and anyone in earshot has a right to say that I’m wrong and say it to my face, no matter how firm my belief (wishful thinking?) may be about Bush’s Djibouti empire. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary.

I guess the point is probably moot, though. In 500 years there probably won’t be any children left to educate. Because of another scientific fact the righties are getting very, very wrong.

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