How rational is America?

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/11/how-rational-america


The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, one of the stops on the Little Atoms Road Trip. Photograph: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images

This is the first of a short series of columns, so I'll begin with a brief introduction. I'm the producer and presenter of a radio show and podcast called Little Atoms. It's a talk show mainly concerned with popular science and rationalism, encompassing the "Sceptic" movement. We're interested in how science and culture, and often science and religion, rub up against each other.

I'm not a scientist by training, my interest in science and scepticism coming quite late in life. As a child in the 1970s I was obsessed by the space race, and I was a fan of the science fiction of the era, such as Star Wars and Close Encounters and Silent Running. I read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction. I'd therefore have claimed that I was interested in science, but what I would have really meant was weird phenomena: Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.

I presumed all of these things to be, if not true exactly, then at least plausible and worthy of study by researchers. I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between palaeontologists searching for ancient bones, and the search for the Loch Ness Monster.

Then one day I accidentally bought Carl Sagan's masterpiece The Demon Haunted World, presuming from the title that it was another book about unexplained phenomena. And it was, just not in the way I was expecting. Sagan calmly explains in the book that there are natural physical phenomena that are provable, and others that are not, and that there exists in the scientific method a mechanism for telling this stuff apart. This was a revelation to me.

[ananda]

1. Not rational..

I think that a society or world built on oppression and separation.. rugged individualism so to speak.. literally cannot be rational because the universe and the humans in it are interconnected holistically. That's what we lost when we conquered and killed off the native spirit. The native leaders and shamans spoke to this, but dangit, white people really have trouble listening. We like to talk and oppress... and yes, it's making us crazy, even to the level of our collective unconscious.

[hobbit709]

2. If you believe that the tasty morsel in the foreground would last 5 minutes with that raptor

Then you are in no way rational.

[baldguy]

3. One of the two major political parties put this person up for the Vice Presidency

And almost 60 million people voted for her.



Does that answer your question?

[KG]

4. all you have to do is to read the comments section of yahoo, the local paper, etc

to get an inkling of how deep and profound the pool of ignorance in this country really is...

[KG]

5. rational DURec

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Thinking is a lot of hard work ...

and not a habit everyone chooses to cultivate.

Easier to vote what you 'feel' or 'believe' rather than what you can support by reasoned argument.