OK, so there will always be people who believe in conspiracies. Or, as novelist Benjamin Disraeli wrote in a long-forgotten 1844 novel entitled Coningsby, "The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. "( As a side note, this quote would be used by the forger of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion to "prove" the international Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world . . .)
While perhaps we can understand -- if not completely forgive -- the petty and the paranoid for seeing the world through the lens of conspiracy, what about those who promote conspiracy for political or monetary profit? To my way of thinking, they are traitors to reason, poisoners of the intellectual well.
I don't know if Allen West believes much of what he says -- that there are those 80 card-carrying Communists in Congress or that the president is enriching African Americans at the taxpayers expense. I would make a small wager that West doesn't believe much of what he says, but propounds these notions in order to garner greater name recognition and votes. Then too, I don't know if Georgia Representative Dr. Paul Broun, M. D . really, truly believes that Evolution, the Big Bang Theory and Embryology are ". . . lies straight out of hell," or that the world, which he claims was created in six days, is no more than 9,000 years old. Perhaps he does, and that certainly is his right -- as much as I find his positions to be first-class head-scratchers.
In the end, the question is:
Which is worse: To believe in things which are inherently at odds with the past 200 years of human progress and scientific discovery, or to say things you really don't believe in order to garner publicity and win votes?
-2012 Kurt F. Stone
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