The Eternal Sunshine Of The Open Mind

The mind is a beautiful thing.

Or should I say: the open mind is a beautiful thing.

Because there’s nothing uglier than a closed mind. The closed mind, like the devil, has many names: Inquisition. Bigot. Racist. Taliban (which is quite ironic…it means “students” in Arabic, even though these students learn nothing).

…Fundamentalist.

But the open mind has all the promise of a sunny morning. There’s a world of wonders out there; the only you ticket you need to ride is an open mind and all those wonders are accessible.

Children have open minds. They don’t know much and are eager to find out more about the world around them. I’m not sure why, but many of the people charged with feeding their minds are more interested in closing them, one window at a time. They don’t want them to be curious about anything. They want Mini-Mes that radiate the same comfortable prejudices they hold to be self-evident. The want mirrors, echoes, no betrayals, no surprises.

If it’s up to them, no kid will ever experience the great thrill of discovery, the exhilaration of challenging ideas, the empowerment that comes with figuring it out.

Kid, they say, it’s all in here (the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine of the Green Spaghetti Monster). Stop thinking right now and study on righteousness as we would have you learn it. Stop questioning. Stop wondering. Stop being curious. Just stop. Be dead from the neck up and stay that way until the rest of you catches up.

This haste to close the mind of the child is a great criminal act, and yet it’s a form of abuse that is routinely encouraged in schools, libraries, online, wherever kids congregate, perpetrated by adults who should get down on their knees and beg forgiveness from the deity of their choice and pray they haven’t ruined the precious minds of their children already.

By the way, this diatribe is being brought to you by the people of Florida who decided this week that evolution is a “theory” and in order to be true to the principle of “academic freedom” it will be taught as such, that it has yet to be conclusively proven.

In doing so, they are bowing to pressure from religious fundamentalists, the Taliban of Florida, who are trying to maintain a wedge for the notion that some Guy (most definitely a guy) named God created the universe via some mechanism known as “intelligent design”.

Some proponents of intelligent design are semi-sophisticates and go as far as saying that perhaps God’s mechanism is evolution; they try to envision a universe that has it both ways – the ways of God and the ways of science. But fundamentalists who believe in the literal truth of the Bible actually insist the world is 6000 years old, and cite “evidence” provided by James Ussher, a 17th century Irish bishop, that the world began on Sunday October, 23, 4004 BC. Mike Huckabee, Republican candidate for president, is one of these happy people.

And he ain’t the only one. You’d be surprised at the number of otherwise intelligent people who stake their flag in this ground, then try to argue with what the National Academy of Sciences calls the “foundation of modern biology.”

“Regrettably,” the learned members of the academy continue in their recent brief Science, Evolution and Creationism, “effective science education in our schools is being undermined by efforts to introduce non-scientific concepts about evolution into science classrooms.”

And that’s what’s going on in Florida. “What’s going on here,” said Roberto Martinez, one of three rational board of education members who voted against the “theory” gambit, “is an effort by people who are opposed to evolution to water down our standards. No matter how much the current strategy may have evolved in the past 20 years, the DNA is the same…creationism.”

So in Florida, science that has been proven over and over again via the fossil record and DNA research and common ancestry, not to mention measurements from astronomy and geology, is to be undermined by a single word…theory. Some will use this to preach (not teach) the equivalence of creationism, even if there not a shred of evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer, nor can there ever be. That’s why they call it “faith”.

The National Academy of Sciences says that “teaching creationist ideas in science class confuses students about what constitutes science and what does not.”

It does more than that. It allows powerful people to close minds. Texas, where a former Bush appointee led the dismissal of a pro-evolution education official, revises its curriculum later this year, and you can be sure that the “academic freedom proposal” will be employed to yet again undermine real science in favor of fake science, i.e. intelligent design.

I’ll admit, there’s a lot we don’t know about the process of evolution. That’s why we have science…we gather evidence; we find things out. We don’t look at a flower and intone with glazed-over eyes that God must have made it. We find out how flowers happen. We exercise our curiosity, our freedom to inquire. We don’t assume. We use our entire mind, not just the fearful little part that seeks the comforting embrace of authority. And we consider the evidence -- which points to the fact that flowers evolved from single cell entities over billions of years. Thousands upon thousands of pieces of that evidence exists. That's science; anything else is called...faith.

I suppose you can sympathize with those people who look at nature and freak out. It’s so cold and purposeless. Throughout the universe, entire galaxies are swallowed by black holes and God the Guy, who is supposed to care for every sparrow that flies, has apparently gone fishin'. People who need to be reassured will seek reassurance. People who need power over others will manipulate that need.

Thankfully, the hucksters of reassurance have not made curiosity extinct. There are still people who are compelled to find out what’s really going on. For everyone out there who has not closed the window and drawn the blind, I propose the following challenge: don’t let the darkness fall on our children. Keep your mind open and be open to theirs.

Oh, and the world is not 6000 years old. It is 4.5 billion. Bishop Ussher was off by a mere 4,499, 994,000 years. That’s what you get for looking it up in the Bible.