Quote of the Day - "Educated"

Sorry it's been a while. Somehow my blogging train got derailed, and I'm trying to get it back on track. I wish I had time to write more tonight, but I wanted to at least share this thought:

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle

I am instinctively wary of anyone--conservative or liberal, zealots or atheists, and every stripe in between--who insists they have all the answers, and shows open scorn for the ideas of anyone who disagrees with them.

I heard such a person on the radio this morning. The Iraq War began fives years ago today, and NPR was interviewing a government official and a scholar on how things currently stand in Iraq and where to go from here. The scholar correctly noted that America's leaders started an ill-advised war because they reached a certain conclusion about Iraq and then stubbornly ignored any contradictory evidence or counsel. Ironically, he then demonstrated the same blind attitude himself.

He said the government is still doing everything wrong and the Iraqi people all want us to leave, but whenever the official presented statistics that contradicted his ideas the scholar ignored them or changed the subject. Finally the official gave up trying to reason with him because he obviously had no interest in anything that contradicted his theories (many of which seem based on his personal opinion rather than any evidence or research). The exchange was frustrating to listen to, and frankly it destroyed the scholar's credibility.

I think it is important to think things through and reach your own conclusions about them, but once we've done so it's important to remember that we can still learn a lot more, even from those we disagree with on some points. None of us would claim to know everything but we certainly act that way sometimes, and I think it's a tragic waste of opportunity when we assume that just because we disagree with someone about one important thing, they must be wrong about everything else, too.

A Year Ago . . . I Wanna Be A Redhead