I’m loosing hope. Specifically, I’m loosing hope in the thought processes & decision making processes of our own people, in particular. For an example, I’ll use two of my favorite topics, religion & politics.
I’ve touched on this subject before, but what spurred me to thinking about it seriously was a small story in the TU on the bottom of the religion page of Friday, 09.07.07. It told of some state park naturalists visiting the new creation museum. They went there to try & resolve opposing views of evolution/creationism. Creationism holds that the earth was created in six days about six thousand years ago & that man was created in his present form. Evolution holds a different theory. The earth is billions of years old and that man has evolved from lower forms of life to his present form.
That story, in turn, got me curious about other stories I’ve read on other subjects where people believed in one view in spite of a preponderance amount of evidence to the contrary. I dug into the files in my computer & came up with some interesting statistics.
On the issue of evolution/creationism, approximately 50% of Americans generally accept creationism over evolution. A sizeable number of those agree with the “young earth,” hypothesis. Here’s another good one. Approximately 68% of Republicans believe in creationism instead of evolution.
On the issue of politics, up to this day, almost 50% of Americans still believe that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam harbored Al Quaeda terrorists. This is still believed in spite of overwhelming, documented evidence to the contrary. One has to ask why.
One other interesting statistic came up. Remember, I chose these two because of my interest in them. I’m sure that there are other topics that run the same way. But the most interesting aspect on these two subjects is that it is primarily American. The views we seem to hold are almost completely opposite for the rest of the inhabitants on our little blue rock. I have no evidence at all to offer as an explanation.
Maybe some of you can contribute to asking the two questions. Why do some people hold on to an opinion, when evidence suggests something different? As a caveat, I should say that I’m not talking about ambiguous evidence. That would be understandable. Why does it obviously seem that this kind of thinking process seem to be used most by Americans as opposed to the rest of the world? Any thoughts?
RichK