If anything is truly despicable in a leader it is a disdain for science. Science is not just labs and experiments. It is an approach to life itself. It assumes that everything is a subject of investigation. It is open to any and all hypotheses and demands only a respect for truth and for honest methods of investigation which are open to all for verification.
It is unthinkable that any president of any country would harbor an attitude similar to that of Mr. trump. To call him despicable because of it is something I would do to his face. Such an attitude in our era is a death warrant to all within the scope of the man's considerable power.
Trump has already made it more possible for an airborne disease to kill Americans.
Science is reality
Science is not opposed to religion. It is the other way around and that is very sad. A true spirituality is not opposed to science. A true spirituality will understand that scientific investigation of our origins is a holy activity. We have in the sayings of Einstein and the reputed atheist Spinosa and the renegade Christion Charles Sanders Peirce three disparate examples of veneration for science. Their influence has been widely felt. They were united in understanding terms used by Peirce as indicative marks of truth. I am speaking of continuity and fallibility.
Trump's sense of continuity is non-existent, it seems.
Or else he would care about future generations. His sense of fallibility is likewise absent. He is like a psychotic rooster crowing when tears would be more appropriate.
Grief in the face of disdain
It is sad to say such things. But they must be said, Trump perhaps barely admits to being a Presbyterian, a denomination that has internal divisions of those who do and do not believe in science.
Where there is not belief the motive can only be one of exclusion which is in itself an evil. Science, good science, excludes no one and nothing.
Pictures from the March on Science from the U.S. and around the world https://t.co/q31pL5qvHe pic.twitter.com/N0BheXf1wB
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 22, 2017
Today's marchers bear no animus toward their fellow human beings.
They do not despise the findings that tell us that we create harmful conditions that must be addressed. Prominent persons within the one percent like the Koch Brothers pollute the skies and befoul the waters. They create charities to mask their attacks on the true and the beautiful. Bear them no animus. Pity them for one day they will face their Maker and have to account for what they have done in a court where justice and love are a unity and where the punishment is to look honestly into a mirror.
Give praise and blessing to science and scientists. Ask only that they maintain honesty and loyalty to the principles that underly science. Charles Sanders Peirce told us not to hamper inquiry. That is the battle cry of reason and logic. It seems not to be remotely audible in the West Wing.