Letters to the Editor
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Salon posters disappointing
Slogging through 12 pages of postings about this article, one can't help but getting a bit forlorn.
Most posters complain about the theology behind the museum. But that specific theology is shared by a good 40% of U.S. citizens.
Of those complainers, one wonders how many believe that if they are good, they will go to "heaven?" Is there any better basis for a belief in heaven than there is for saddled dinosaurs broken to ride?
The posters ignore the fact that perhaps the majority of that most-deluded 40% are in fact decent people who care about our world and try to do the right thing.
The 40% afraid to die in large part, so they try to propitiate "the" god by believing in some fairly vacuous silliness. How many posters, on the other hand, aren't afraid to die?
The 40% constitute a large majority of the people who believe Bush no matter what humbug he's pushing, even when the words, even as they are spilling out his mouth, are as disprovable as the fantasy about the Biblical "flood" and the Grand Canyon.
And that goes to the core of the problem, perhaps. How may we sway them to believe that global warming is more real than are the prayers of Pat Robertson or James Dobson? How can we get them to understand that the Constitution never meant to force the working and middle classes to pay for the private schooling of the children of the rich? How can they learn that AIDS is not the well-deserved consequences of sin, but a problem to be dealt with rationally including via legitimate sex education and population control programs? How can we get them to understand that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are at least as important as the continued existence of some unfettered monozygote swimming around in a uterus?
These things are important. Anger and disdain won't rectify or ameliorate these problems any more than quoting scripture will.