To think is already to doubt

The ayatollahs know what threatens them, bless their little hearts.

Ayatollah Khamenei said this week that the study of social sciences “promotes doubts and uncertainty.” He urged “ardent defenders of Islam” to review the human sciences that are taught in Iran’s universities and that he said “promote secularism,” according to Iranian news services. “Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings,” Ayatollah Khamenei said at a gathering of university students and professors on Sunday, according to IRNA, the state news agency. Teaching those “sciences leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.”

Quite right. The more you learn, both about how to think and about what well-conducted thinking can find out about the world, the less you believe in the baseless tissue of inventions that make up any kind of godly teachings. Therefore, real education (as opposed to the training one gets in madrassas and Sunday schools) is in tension with religion; therefore, dogmatic religion hates and fears real education. We know. Helpful of Khamenei to spell it out so clearly.

It’s interesting (though not surprising) to see that lunatics in Texas and elsewhere are right there with the good ayatollah. Education is scary bad evil socialist propaganda! Get out of here with that scary education stuff! Don’t come in here attacking godly folks with all this demonic learning and thinking and education!

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening. The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out.

Well why not just have an alternate speech, in which Sarah Palin urges students to be like her and try to get by without knowing anything at all?

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