The Antisocial Socialist

Over the last few days, the "is the magic in the Harry Potter books real?" debate I referred to awhile ago has picked up again on the Mailing List of Doom. There's still a resounding lack of people standing up and e-shouting: "It's fiction. It's make-believe! Get over it!" It seems that liberal tolerance includes tolerance for complete stupidity -- believing that a child can make a broomstick fly with the power of his thoughts is, apparently, an opinion that I'm supposed to respect. Because this is Canada. We are supposed to respect everyone's opinions.

Bollocks.

Now, I've been accused of being an intolerant person in the past. I'm kind of proud of it. I like my inner fascist; she has good fashion sense. I refuse to, for example, accept neo-Nazi ideology as "just another opinion" that somehow deserves to be heard because of some fuzzy-headed liberal notion of free speech*.

Meanwhile, American schools are happily teaching Creationism in science classes. Now, I'm all for this, because I think that the shoddy, religious-based education that American schoolchildren will receive will quickly lead to a decline in America's ability to compete as an economic superpower within a generation or two. And America's certainly been an irresponsible economic superpower. It's only fair to let the Flat Earth Society send the US to hell and let a handful of more intelligent populaces have a chance to call the shots. But what I do resent is a cultural tolerance for stupidity.

The rebranding of Creationism as Intelligent Design is at once funny and sad. Imagine history classes where students discuss how Prometheus contributed to the Industrial Revolution or economics classes where we speculate on how the coming rise of Cthulhu will affect the New York Stock Exchange, and you'll see why The Shrub and Co. are making me giggle so much lately. But it's disturbing in that we are being told that we have to accept everyone's opinion, no matter how demonstrably false or outlandish, as potential fact. (Unless said person is gay or Muslim or a socialist, of course.)

That's different than respect. I respect religious people and their beliefs, just as I enjoy reading fantasy novels with magic spells in them. There's obviously a place for studying religion in school -- most schools have comparative religion courses, and that's something we should all encourage. I wish there'd been a class like that in my high school. And people are free to do all the spells they want outside of the public sphere, whether they want to summon Jesus or Hecate. But are we expected to discuss, in the middle of an environmental science class, whether lightning comes from atmospheric electricity or from Zeus?

As uberbitsch points out, one shouldn't be so open-minded that one's brain falls out.

*Free speech, of course, being another myth in Western capitalist societies, based on the assumption that everyone has a right to free speech. Obviously, someone with the money to erect a gigantic billboard has more of a right to free speech than someone who puts up a photocopied political poster. And we can get into the whole libel chill/blogchill thing too, where your official freedom of speech is limited by the right of those who have power over you to make your life a living hell for publicly speaking your mind.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I'm following a new theology now.