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Henceforth, people will be looking at the universe with the eyes of oxen.
- Katib Chelebi, seventeenth -century geographer
"Barack Obama won't show us his birth certificate," insists Steve, a Connecticut resident and small business owner, while shoveling his walk during one of this year's snowstorms. "He's a Muslim terrorist. And you know what really bothers me? He is doing exactly what Hitler did."
Steve, forty-five, has plenty of other opinions relating to the American president, culture, and society. He can rattle off the prized talking points of this country's culture of belief without missing a beat: The moon landing was a hoax; the world is ending in 2012; 9/11 was an inside job; creationism is valid science.
A hard-working fellow and family man in a post-industrial factory town of a blue state, Steve does not come across as fanatical. Yet his adherence to raw belief - a position unassailable by factual counter-data - is more than an inherently dangerous American mindset. It is a deadly challenge to the aim of humanism.
The "belief" mindset is pretty common in the news these days. That much of it seems directed at the current presidential administration is almost irrelevant, though we should linger here just a moment to reflect that it's now getting legal attention: the U.S. Army is set to court-martial a soldier who refused deployment to Afghanistan because the soldier - Lt. Colonel Terry Lakin- shares with Steve the belief that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Neither Lakin nor Steve nor thousands of other "birthers" can put forth any evidence, documentation, or data that withstands the test of scrutiny. They just, well, believe it.
Ironically enough, their blind allegiance is precisely like the more extreme elements of their political rivals. While "birthers" are largely a Republican phenomenon, the "9/11 Truth Movement" stems chiefly from the liberal wing of American politics - as fervent in their belief that the United States' own government used controlled demolition to destroy the Twin Towers as the birthers are that Obama has perpetrated a global hoax to keep his birth certificate under wraps.
Clearly the appeal of blind faith has been part of human history since the earliest days of Babylonia. In the United States, however, we have...