We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.
A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,”Pattiann Rogers — who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequentpresence in The Universe in Verse — offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book Flickering (public library).
HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES by Pattiann Rogers
I.
Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created within the images of the creator’s creation.
Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened to thundering clouds of hail and rain.
Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven, polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon, inside and outside a circumference in the image of freedom.
Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.
II.
Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions, images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth, deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood… let there be suffering, let there be survival.
Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be terror and tears. Let there be pity.
Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish skittering backward through a freshwater stream with all eight appendages in perfect coordination, both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.
III.
Made in the image of the moon, where else would the name of ivory rock craters shine except in our eyes… let there be language.
Displayed in the image of the rotting seed on the same stem with the swelling blossom… let there be hope.
Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly, eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling, until the right chord sounds from one brave strum of the right strings reverberating, fading away like evening… let there be pathos, let there be compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be weightless beauty.
Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves, following the mode and model of the creator’s creation, particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness, even though the unknown far away and the unknown nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill and accounting, let there be praise resounding.
Ken Ham says evangelicals have ‘lost Gen Z’ because he and his ilk can no longer indoctrinate children in public schools.
We explore his claims and figure out where the blame really rests.
Reading Time: 10 MINUTES
YouTube offered me a Ken Ham short video the other day, which demonstrates that I have completely confused its algorithm. In it, the serial grifter and ur-liar-for-Jesus offers his thoughts about why evangelicals “lost Gen Z.” Let’s go over his video and see if he’s right. Then let’s see where the blame really rests.
A quick introduction to Ken Ham and Creationism
Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.
Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today. The newly-politicized and tribalism-addled group happily absorbed Creationism along the way. By the late 1990s, Creationism was a required belief for them.
Often, Young-Earth Creationists call their belief system “intelligent design.” In this way, they pretend it’s not just another name for Young-Earth Creationism. In the 1990s and 2000s, this dishonesty was absolutely key to their disingenuous attempts to sneak their beliefs into public schools. I will not be granting them this pious fraud.
Ham and his associates also erroneously believe that Christians who don’t accept Creationism are Jesusing all wrong.
He thinks this because of a very childish interpretation of the Bible called literalism. That means they erroneously think that everything in the Bible literally happened the way the Bible’s writers describe it. Their entire faith system depends on this belief being 100% true. So they get very fretful when other Christians have differing interpretations of the Bible. They think that such inconsistency “undermines” a Christian’s beliefs.
As far as I know, they have conducted no research into that assumption. In fact, they haven’t conducted much original research at all since their early years—because their field researchers kept realizing that Creationism was impossible and deconverting from the belief.
Ken Ham insists this is “the FIRST Post-Christian Generation,” y’all!
And now we arrive at Ken Ham’s first error. It occurs in his video’s title.
Ken Ham calls this video “The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z.”
But this isn’t the first post-Christian generation. Ken Ham attributes this idea to Barna Group, which has also referred to Gen Z that way.
Researchers began calling America “post-Christian” back in 2013. That puts us very solidly into Millennial territory, since they were born between 1981-1996. The oldest Gen Z people (born between 1997-2012) in 2013 would have been roughly 15. Folks that young aren’t generally pushing the religion needle one way or the other.
Rather, Millennials began—and are still—turning America post-Christian, not Gen Z. That’s the generation that evangelicals panicked about in the 2010s.
Gen Z simply continues the trend of increasing secularity in America.
But okay, Ken Ham. How exactly did you lot manage to lose an entire upcoming generation of adults?
Ken Ham has lost Gen Z, everyone! (Has he looked under the sofa?)
Moving on, Ken Ham tells us in the video:
But now we have the second world view dominating because we have allowed generations of kids to be indoctrinated in an education system that has thrown God out, the Bible out, prayer out, Creation[ism] out. They teach you all came about by natural processes. There is no supernatural, there is no God.
Sorry to say this, but the majority of pastors have endorsed that system, told parents that’s fine, but don’t worry about what they’re being taught. Just come along, we’ll tell them about Jesus. And you see now we’re seeing generations who have a different foundation and a whole different worldview. And Generation Z in particular is called by George Barna, Christian researcher, “the first post-Christian generation” in this nation.“The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z,” Ken Ham. Uploaded 5/20/23.
Ken Ham himself posted this video to his own channel. That fact forces me to conclude that he is actually proud of this 36-second burst of poor reasoning and dishonesty.
Christians often accuse others of exactly what they themselves do (or want to do). This time the trope is egregiously easy to see.
So is Ham’s self-interest. Gosh, the products he happens to sell could fix this awful problem! Who could have seen that coming?
Why Ken Ham is fretting about Gen Z
Ken Ham sounds very, very upset that he may no longer indoctrinate children to believe his quirky, dishonest, error-packed li’l take on the Bible. By indoctrination, of course, he means dogmatic claims shoved at people—in this case, children—who must accept them without questions or reservation. He wants to indoctrinate children, so he assumes that schools do the same. His is good, though. Theirs is ickie and evil.
But which children does he mean?
Surely not children attending his flavor of Christianity’s religious schools or being insularly-homeschooled by fellow Creationists. Those children are already being indoctrinated with his beliefs. He can’t be upset about losing them.
No, he’s upset that he can no longer indoctrinate the children attending public, taxpayer-funded schools in America. Those schools are off-limits to people like him. Those children are beyond his reach.
Unless a teacher wishes to present Creationism in the context of why it isn’t at all real science, or in the context of a religious belief alongside others, then that’s the only way children in public schools will learn about his beliefs in that setting. In other words, Creationism won’t be presented the way Ken Ham wants it presented: in science classes as an indoctrination meant to completely undermine the backbone of science, the scientific method, and the basic concepts it helped humans understand, like the Theory of Evolution.
No, if Ken Ham wants to indoctrinate those children, then he must get the explicit permission of their parents. And American law, which protects Americans’ right to freedom of religion, has placed strict rules around when and where such indoctrination may occur in a public-school context.
Alas, Ken Ham doesn’t think that his desired indoctrination will take if he can’t use public schools to push it at children. Unless children are surrounded by it 24/7, it won’t overcome what children are learning in public schools. More to the point, it won’t overcome the worldview they are absorbing.
Ken Ham’s god isn’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat a worldview that simply doesn’t lend itself to accepting the claims Ken Ham likes to make.
The ‘biblical worldview’ that’s almost extinct
You might notice that Ken Ham quoted George Barna in assessing Gen Z as ‘lost’ to evangelicals. George Barna started Barna Group many years ago (though he eventually left it to pursue a solo career). Barna Group is a for-profit survey house that sells analyses of its research and polls to worried evangelical parents and leaders. Barna Group workers’ jobs involve creating analyses that will open evangelical wallets.
And nothing worries evangelicals and opens their wallets quite like predicting imminent disaster.
Indeed, George Barna must be having quite a heyday. For years now, he has been crying in the wilderness about the extinction of the ‘biblical worldview.’
If you’re wondering what “biblical” means in this context, it’s simply a Christianese adjective that indicates that its noun is something the judging Christian likes.
Usually, you’ll only see this adjective in evangelical writing, where it modifies any number of nouns:
Biblical marriage. That’s opposite-sex, hetero-only, woman-subjugating marriage between one man and one woman who follow evangelicals’ weird, regressive gender-role expectations.
Biblical parenting. That’s the creepy, punishment-oriented, dysfunctional-authoritarian parenting style that evangelicals think is the only way to set children up for lifelong faith.
Biblical dating. Think “Duggar-style courtship” and you won’t be far off the mark.
Evangelicals love sneering at other flavors of Christianity as sub-par, even though there is no way whatsoever to say that any one flavor is more authentically Christian than any other. The word biblical is how they do their sneering: by implying that other takes aren’t based on the Bible like theirs is.
So a biblical worldview simply means the worldview of a hardline evangelical like Ken Ham or George Barna.
Why Ken Ham and George Barna think that their biblical worldview is going extinct
By 2023, Barna was alarmed to find that the percentage of Americans generally who had a biblical worldview had declined from 6% in March 2020 to 4%. Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2023, he found that the percentage of Americans calling themselves “born again” had likewise declined from 19% to 13%.
Either way, Barna certainly thinks that his worldview is going “extinct.” By extension, so does Ken Ham. In Ham’s case, he’s also very certain that public education is to blame. Of course, Creationists have never conducted any research regarding this assertion. But he’s still very certain of it, and certainty—even if it’s completely misplaced—carries a lot of weight with literalists.
(Related: “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind” — this dissertation will tell you immediately why Creationists aren’t real big on science.)
That worldview is what is most important to evangelicals
In the context of indoctrinating children, evangelicals like Ken Ham are well aware that their god is nearly helpless up against a mismatched worldview. If children cannot be taught or forced to adopt a worldview amenable to Ken Ham’s flavor of Christianity, then they’ll think for the rest of their lives that his claims are whackadoodle-squared.
I remember our first year on the field literally thinking, “No one is ever, ever going to come to faith in Christ, no matter how many years I spend here.”
I thought this because for the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with the realities that the story of Jesus was so completely other to the people I was living among. Buddhism and the East had painted such a vastly different framework than the one I was used to that I was at a loss as to how to even begin to communicate the gospel effectively.
And so, the Amy-Carmichael-Wanna-Be [a famous Irish missionary] that I was, I dug in and started learning the language. I began the long, slow process of building relationships with the nationals, and I ended up spending lots of time talking about the weather and the children in kitchens. And while over time, I became comfortable with helping cook the meal, I saw very little movement of my local friends towards faith.“Rice Christians and Fake Conversions,” Laura Parker, 1/28/13
Unfortunately for Ken Ham and his like-minded pals, they have a much worse problem than that missionary. Their worldview is very much on the outer fringes of Christianity. So they’re not just fighting reality itself, but every more-sensible flavor of their own religion. Even if a child has a generally-Christian worldview, that’s not enough to make Creationist claims sound plausible.
The demographic time bomb exploded years ago for Creationists
It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that one of the main witnesses for the plaintiffs in the landmark Creationism-based Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005 was a Christian, Dr. Kenneth Miller. Miller, a biology professor, had, in fact, written many peer-reviewed biology articles and even a popular biology textbook.
For years prior to this lawsuit’s filing, Creationists had been champing at the bit for exactly such an opportunity. They’d been sneaking their indoctrination materials into public schools for yearsin hopes of provoking it. Finally, parents and science teachers in one small, out of the way town got sick of their antics and filed suit against their district’s school board—which was led by and packed with Creationists and their sycophants.
The judge in that case, John E. Jones III, was likewise a Christian—and a Dubya appointee. So Creationists were doubly sure that they’d successfully win the right to push their religious materials into public science classrooms.
They brought their A+ game to this fight, insofar as they could, I suppose.
And they got completely BTFO. They lost. They not only lost, but they lost in the most humiliating ways possible. Not only did Creationism get exposed as purely religious in nature, not only was the Dover school board leader caught red-handed lying to a federal judge, not only were their own witnesses—the ones who didn’t just withdraw from the trial, I mean—exposed as clown-shoes incompetents, but Dover-area voters also immediately replaced the Dover school board with people who understood and accepted real science.
(If you like definitive legal smackdowns or even just want to learn every single way that Creationism is not science but instead absolutely positively simply Christian indoctrination aimed at grooming children to hold a Creationism-friendly worldview, Jones’ opinion paper cannot be missed. It’s one of my favorite reads, a GOAT winner.)
And Gen Z had a front-row seat to watch it happen
Evangelicals’ decline started right around this same time. From 2006, their roller coaster only went downhill.
I really feel like that’s when the pendulum began to swing back to sanity regarding Christians trying to infiltrate public schoolrooms. People began taking those attempts a lot more seriously after that. Sure, Creationists still tried to get into public schools, and they still do try. But they’re tightly constrained compared to how things were before 2005.
I’m bringing up this trial almost 20 years later for a reason. The aftereffects of it cannot be overestimated.
Remember, Gen Z was getting born during the Dover period as well (they were born between 1997-2012). Parents with Gen Z kids were direct witnesses of this evangelical overreach. And the youngest kids in Dover classrooms in 2005 were Gen Z.
The real surprise is that even 4% of Gen Z kids have a biblical worldview, not that so few do. I doubt that percentage will rise.
Ken Ham has no clue in the world how to deal with that demographic time bomb, either
Nowadays, Ken Ham preaches to his choir in his little safe space. I don’t think he makes many new converts to his flavor of Christianity. Instead, he’s stuck in that safe space with a dwindling number of believers. I’m sure it’s very cozy, at least. But it’s going to get less comfortable as the years pass.
The problem Ken Ham is having is that his worldview doesn’t come naturally to anyone. It has to be coached extensively into people who don’t know any better. So generally, that coaching must begin very early. It must also be reinforced constantly and from all sides. Children must be absolutely shrink-wrapped to maintain it.
Even so, the moment such a child ventures out into the real world, their false worldview always risks toppling in the face of reality. There simply does not exist a way for the Ken Hams of the world to shrink-wrap a child so well that reality cannot ever penetrate those layers of indoctrination.
Not anymore, anyway. At one time, I’m sure it was a lot easier to build those bubbles.
As Ken Ham himself has admitted, evangelicals have already lost Gen Z. But let’s be clear here: they lost Gen Z because Gen X and older Millennials refused to allow their children to be indoctrinated with a Creationism-friendly worldview. He demonizes schools for this refusal, but really he’s missed a few steps here!
That said, I’m sure he wishes with all his heart that he could indoctrinate those children without their parents knowing, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Now younger Millennials are poised to start having their own children. Those children will be part of Gen Alpha (born between 2013-2025) and whatever we call the next age cohort. It seems very likely that they will also generally refuse to allow their children to learn fake science to make Ken Ham happy.
His roller coaster may be reaching the end of the ride. But the future for children has never been brighter as a result.
From an unpromising beginning, Joe Biden has become one of the most progressive presidents the U.S. has ever had.
Reading Time: 3 MINUTES
I’m not ashamed to admit it: Joe Biden has exceeded my expectations.
When he was running in the 2020 presidential primaries, I wasn’t thrilled by him. I thought Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were better options. Both of them represented a bold progressive spirit that America sorely needed—while Biden, I believed, was at best a reiteration of the status quo. I thought he stood for more of the same bland, watered-down, just-barely-left-of-center politics that have defined the Democratic Party for decades.
But I was wrong.
Enter Dark Brandon
I never expected to write these words, but Joe Biden is the most transformative Democratic president of my lifetime. Despite having only a nailbiter majority, he’s racked up a long list of big, significant wins.
At the top of this list is the Inflation Reduction Act, far and away the most ambitious law ever passed to fight climate change and build a better future for our children. He brought the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement and shut down the Keystone XL pipeline. He won ratification of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, phasing out hydrofluorocarbons that are a major cause of global warming.
He’s passed a series of less world-historical, but still big and badly needed, infrastructure bills. He’s made several other progressive wishlist items a reality, like enshrining Juneteenth as a federal holiday, ending the forever war in Afghanistan, forgiving student loan debt, giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices, capping insulin costs, and outlawing forced arbitration and NDAs in workplace sexual assault cases.
He’s been a steadfast supporter of arming Ukraine to defend against Russia’s savage war of aggression. He oversaw the appointment of a special counsel that’s now moving forward with the well-deserved prosecution of Donald Trump. He’s confirmed a record number of federal judges.
President Joe Biden made history Tuesday when he visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers who are striking for higher wages and cost-of-living increases.
Biden, who is looking to polish his pro-labor persona, is the first sitting president to appear on a picket line.
Speaking through a bullhorn, he told the striking autoworkers in Wayne County, “You deserve what you earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”“Biden makes history by joining striking autoworkers on the picket line.” Peter Nicholas, NBC News, 26 September 2023.
I was, frankly, shocked to hear that Joe Biden is the first sitting president ever to show up on a picket line. Barack Obama, when he was a candidate, said he would do it but never did.
Even in the golden age of American unions, presidents like Eisenhower or Kennedy never took a step as audacious as this. But after all, why not?
Republican presidential candidates speak to evangelical churches, because they know that’s their base of support. If there’s anything that Democrats have consistently stood for, it’s the working class and unions. In an age of gross inequality and concentrated corporate power, politicians should take a stand for labor against capital. The moneyed classes may throw a tantrum over it, but there’s no more natural alliance than a Democratic president and organized labor.
Hot Labor Summer
It’s been a year of renewed labor power and activism. And for the most part, unions has been winning.
The Writers’ Guild of America just won their strike against the Hollywood studios. The Teamsters got a new contract with UPS, securing wage raises and air conditioning in their delivery vans (!!). Although Biden and the Democrats attracted criticism for blocking a railroad workers’ strike, they came back to help them get the sick leave they asked for.
Now the United Auto Workers have gone on strike against the Big Three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (Chrysler). Among their demands are for a 40% raise—the same percentage that company executives have granted themselves over the past few years. That’s the kind of cheeky negotiating tactic I can get behind!
By appearing on the UAW picket line, Biden has put a very large thumb on the scale on the side of the workers. He’s shone a national spotlight on them and given legitimacy to their demands.
Granted, this is a symbolic gesture. But symbolism matters.
The “bully pulpit” is both the president’s most underappreciated power, and in some ways, his broadest. By design, the president isn’t an all-powerful king. His hands are tied by existing law. He can’t force Congress to pass legislation or choose how the courts rule. But, more than the other branches of government, he has power to persuade. For better or for worse, he defines the national mood and chooses what to focus our attention on.
In a strike, where public perception and sympathy plays a large part in deciding the outcome, that matters. When corporations know that the public mood is against them, they have an incentive to settle labor disputes as quickly as possible. That’s a huge gift both to the UAW and to union power in battles yet to come, and we have President Biden to thank for it.
Throughout America’s blue states and cities, Democratic officeholders are passing laws to help people and make their lives better, from education to health care to gun control to the environment to voting rights—and more besides.
Red states are suffering from the laws they voted for.
Thanks to their rejection of Obamacare, rural areas have become health care deserts as hospitals lose money and shut down. COVID-denying, vaccine-refusing ideology has directly led to conservative areas suffering far more deaths and disability than would otherwise have been the case. Abortion bans are causing doctors to flee in droves, leaving states without maternity care. Schools are starved of resources, crippling the minds of the next generation and driving away businesses that need educated workers. Open-carry laws have spurred a plague of gun murders and suicides.
However, the state of the nation isn’t uniformly bleak. While the red states regress, blue states are doing better than ever. In places with enlightened, progressive governments that actually care about the well-being of their citizens, Democrats are passing a blizzard of laws to help people and make their lives better.
The Midwest
Start with Minnesota. Democrats won a trifecta in 2022, taking the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. They immediately made good use of their majority to turn the state into a laboratory in progressive policy:
Just over halfway through their legislative session, Minnesota legislators have already enacted or advanced measures that touch nearly every area of the Democratic Party platform, including policies about reproductive rights, democracy, voting, green energy and LGBTQ protections.
Among other progressive measures, Minnesota Democrats codified abortion rights into law. They massively expanded voting rights, set up automatic voter registration for teenagers, and provided for the automatic restoration of voting rights to people who’ve completed criminal sentences. They expanded background checks and red-flag laws for gun purchases. They required utilities to offer 100% clean energy by 2040. They legalized recreational marijuana.
And that’s not all. Another article, “The Minnesota Miracle“, lists even more Democratic accomplishments: They created a paid family and medical leave program that covers all workers. They passed a child tax credit to help poor families. They banned conversion therapy and passed sanctuary laws for transgender children with family in less tolerant states. They bumped up education spending and instituted free breakfast and lunch for all public school students. They passed laws guaranteeing access to health insurance and driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer also signed a “historic” education budget that boosts per-student spending and expands pre-K. It guarantees free breakfast and lunch for all public school students, making Michigan the seventh state to do so.
There’s also Illinois. While there wasn’t a huge reservoir of pent-up progressive changes in this deep blue state, there were still some good ideas. For example, they passed a law that bans book bans. In response to right-wing censorship, it prevents schools and libraries from removing books based on “partisan or doctrinal disapproval”, on pain of losing state funds. Illinois also eliminated cash bail and expanded support for abortion to help people coming from neighboring states.
The West
The biggest, most forward-thinking initiative in the Western states comes from California. The Golden State is manufacturing its own insulin through the non-profit CalRx initiative.
California will sell insulin for $30, up to 90% less than private companies charge. It will be a major disruption to the price-gouging rampant in Big Pharma. Other generic drugs, like naloxone, may soon follow.
In New York, I’ve previously written about the Build Public Renewables Act, one of the most ambitious laws ever passed to bring us closer to a green-energy future.
The Rhode Island legislature passed a law that makes wage theft a felony—eliminating the longstanding disparity that employees who steal from employers can expect prosecution and harsh punishment, whereas employers could steal from employees with little consequence.
Vermont, like New Mexico, approved a plan that greatly expands child care. It subsidizes families and reimburses providers. It’s paid for by a payroll tax—which is only fair, since employers benefit when their employees have reliable child care.
Massachusetts joins Minnesota and Michigan in making school meals free for all students, and the only surprise is that they hadn’t done so already. Lawmakers also made community college free for state residents.
Last but not least, East Coast states pioneered the idea of shield laws to fight right-wing anti-choice and anti-trans ideology. These laws prevent patients and doctors from being sued, arrested, or prosecuted for receiving abortion or gender-affirming care, and forbid states from cooperating with any such investigation by overreaching law enforcement in red states. Connecticut passed the first of these laws, but the idea has spread to Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Vermont.
As conservative states sink further into the mire of theocracy, the blue states stand above them, shining like lighthouses. Not only are they protecting their citizens against religious-right encroachment, they’re offering more and more benefits like free child care, high-quality education, and access to affordable medical care. Our nation is increasingly diverging onto two separate tracks, and blue states will be havens, not just to liberals, but to everyone who wants to live a happy, healthy and prosperous life.
If you want to be free, you have to have an understanding of the choices. Conservatives who push book bans and rage against pluralistic education are fighting against their own stated goal.
Imagine you find yourself in a room, facing two doors.
One door is rough, weathered wood. The other is made of boards polished smooth.
There’s carved writing on both, but it’s in a language you don’t read, in characters you’ve never seen. There are chains of intricate symbols inlaid into the frames in gold and silver, but they’re utterly meaningless to you.
There’s just one thing you know. One door is the entry into a golden existence: a long life of peace, ease and good health, full of friends and love. The other opens onto a dark and gloomy road: a hard life of unhappiness, suffering, misery, loneliness, and early death.
Knowing that your fate is riding on the choice, which door would you pick?
The cosmic shell game
The correct answer—assuming you’re a rational skeptic—is that this isn’t a choice at all.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another. You have to have some background knowledge, some way to evaluate which of the options before you is better. If you could read the language carved on the doors, or if you recognized any of the symbols, you might be able to make a better-than-chance judgment about the correct one. Without this knowledge, picking either door would be a blind guess. You might as well flip a coin.
Of course, in real life, we’re in an even worse place than this pared-down hypothetical. In the real world, there are more than just two doors. There are thousands, each one densely covered with their own writing and their own symbols (notwithstanding the evangelists who think there are only two choices: “My Religion” and “Everything Else”). In addition to that, each door is surrounded by a dense crowd of people yelling that their door is the one true way to happiness and all the others are pretenders.
Making a choice implies reasons for doing one thing rather than another.
Longtime readers may remember this as the scenario in my essay “The Cosmic Shell Game“. It’s a potent reason to distrust the truth claims of religious believers. No one can investigate all these options, and very few people even try. Instead, most people choose the faith they belong to because of an accident of birth. Their decision is effectively random, no more trustworthy than flipping a coin.
This argument doesn’t just apply to religions. It works equally well as a metaphor for philosophies, nationalities, political ideologies, and every other major life decision where making one choice forecloses others. How can anyone make any trustworthy or informed choices about anything, when the space of possibility is so large as to be unnavigable?
The lay of the land
It’s impossible to study every religion, philosophy and ideology in the universe to make a definitive ranking. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying. We’ll never have perfect knowledge, but we can always gain more knowledge. And the more knowledge we have, the better the choices we can make. It’s like trying to hike across uncharted territory. Even if you don’t have a complete map, the more you know about the lay of the land, the better able you are to find a safe path.
This goes for every field of inquiry. The more you know about history, the more you can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The more you know about science, the less likely you are to hold a belief that was already tested and disproven. The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
The more you know about culture, the more capable you are of judging what is or isn’t natural for humans.
For best results, this knowledge should be a broad cross-section of humanity, not limited to one gender or one race or one religion or one country. It’s the same reason why diverse groups make better decisions: it’s less likely that everyone has the same blind spots, so one person will see what another overlooks. You can achieve the same effect as an individual by stocking your mind with the widest possible selection of human thought and knowledge.
That’s why pluralism is so important in education. It’s the answer to conservatives who think it’s an underhanded liberal ploy—a way to instill leftist values to the exclusion of all others. Actually, it’s just an acknowledgment of a basic fact of reality: it’s really complicated, and figuring stuff out is hard!
Knowledge sets you free
Conservatives say that freedom is their number one value, the thing they care about above all else. Fair enough. Here’s what I say to that: Freedom is only truly possible for an educated person—and the more education you have, the more free you are.
Anyone can be “free” in the wild-animal sense of pursuing immediate desires without constraint. But the truest, most uniquely human kind of freedom is the ability to make decisions that steer the course of your life. Just as in the two-doors analogy, that kind of freedom is only possible when you have the knowledge to make responsible choices. Otherwise, it’s just random guessing or blindly following the path presented by birth or society.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world.
If you had a kitchen cabinet full of cans, some of which were nutritious and some were poison—but you had no way of knowing which is which—would you boast about your “freedom” to pick any one you felt like? Of course not, because no one values the freedom of ignorance or the freedom to plunge blindly into danger. The only kind of freedom anyone wants is the freedom to choose right—whatever you believe the right choice to be.
It’s knowledge that sets you free: both self-knowledge, and knowledge about the world. It’s knowledge that gives you the power to shake off indoctrination, recognize fallacies for what they are, and choose the worldview whose claims are borne out by evidence.
by 
by 
The Pencil-Driven Life 