Maybe you’ve noticed the tendency of religious fervor to intensify in tandem with a decline in intellectualism? Me too. The less we read, the more we rely on, say, Fox News or George Bush to decide our opinions for us and the more inclined we are to think schools would be the perfect place to stuff our kids’ heads full of What Jesus Would Do.
Think, oh, I don’t know… Texas.
Anyway, Susan Jacoby is someone else who shares our opinion in her review of Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, And Doesn’t.
Interestingly, America is defined both as the Developed World’s most religious nation and the most ignorant about it. Not to sound smug, but I have been saying since Day One that education -sorry, secular education- should be the first priority of any nation. Make it accessible, free, and of the highest quality. Doing otherwise is most literally shooting yourself in the foot.
I don’t want to belittle anyone’s right to worship. I’d like to think, however, that although you’ll never be able to put two good God fearin’ folk in a room together and have them agree on every point, you still might hope that they would at least take the time to read the manual.
Ya but if the US didn’t have all them uneducated religious folk running around having 10 kids each, they wouldn’t have the population base to send people off to die. The more educated a population becomes the lower the birth rate becomes, I think I read somewhere this was a large contributing factor to the fall of Rome.
Actually, the major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire was sheer mass. The system of rule depended on provincial rulers paying tribute to a centralized capitol, but with the empire so large there was no real way of maintaining control without constant military reinforcement of the will of Rome. As wealth lead to decay in the capital, there was less and less ability to exert control over the provinces. Decadence and complacency at the heart of the empire, more than anything else, lead to the fall. So you aren’t wrong. The US is constantly compared to Rome because of the same reasons. With so much might comes so much corruption, and it all rots from the inside as the rich get richer and the provinces feel more resentment.