Reason

(cross-posted at Liza's suggestion, from Cocking a Snook!)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

Whether or not you ever watched his game show, if you're a Thinking Parent you probably know that the anti-science, anti-human sophistry of Ben Stein is now a movie called "Expelled", on its tightly controlled private propaganda tour prior to its actual "public" opening in the US April 18. [THAT'S DAY AFTER TOMORROW, folks!] My Sunshine State's whole [bible-thumpin'] legislature was invited [to the sneaky preview] but not reporters.

UPDATE - CNN story just posted here, with full transcript of statement.
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Still watching the live news conference on CNN and thinking it should be required viewing in every school worldwide -- that is, if we do mean to create and preserve real environments that sustain human life by right instead of might.

"Fighting back was simply not an option."
When one is "not equipped for a fight" and reason fails in the face of unhearing, blinded, singleminded Borg-like purpose with superior numbers and ammunition, then Reason itself becomes an unreasonable response forcibly redefined against your will, becoming not an academic exercise but a raw first-rung survival skill, a matter of figuring out who is fit to survive and what it will take.

"We realized that our efforts to reason with these people were not making any headway. Nor were we able to calm some of the individuals down.
It was at this point that we realized that had we resisted there would have been a major fight, one we could not have won, with consequences that would have had major strategic impact. We made a conscious decision to not engage the Iranians and do as they asked.

And even that kind of Raw Reason falters without intelligence, sound information for making wise decisions, and being allowed untwisted, unmanipulated communication within one's one group of fellows and with the real world. Reason stripped, blindfolded and shoved up against the wall to hear the sound of guns being cocked.

My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.

So I was blogging for Thinking Parents today at Snook, about individualism versus institutionalism:

I pretty much hate "versus" applied to any two things. I choose the -ism suffix to mean anything (not just religion) that becomes dominant dogma, elevating some system of belief or aspect of being to an all-purpose imperative, too much of one good thing to the exclusion of others. The one tool that makes every problem look like it needs a good hammering.

In this sense, individual-ism and institutional-ism are indeed opposing mindsets pitted against each other. Ugh!
. . . So today I'm remembering Mortimer Adler's oxymoronic definition of education as the freeing discipline of wonder, and wondering myself where learning without schooling can catch the most light without throwing off too much heat, across the full spectrum of individual and institution?

Two books came to mind in this context --
"The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox" by Stephen Jay Gould is about reconciling science with the humanities, or how to understand them as an integrated whole, and "The Ant and the Peacock" is about reconciling this seeming paradox in nature: are individuals or collectives favored?