Blackburn: You believe it. But do you think it?

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Half of all African-Americans believe that AIDS is a man-made disease intentionally spread by the government. You would think that people who believe that would be angry enough to fire mortar rounds at the White House. At least.

While verifying that 50 percent statistic - it comes from a poll by the Rand Corporation and Oregon State University - I came upon a CNN poll that found that 90 percent of us think the government is covering up 9/11. Wow! It's amazing that any buildings are still standing in Washington. Where are the torches? The pitchforks? The nooses?

Folks, we have a problem with the word believe. People have been known to stand up to lions and firing squads in defense of their beliefs, but no one is standing up to a government that most of us claim to believe is killing some of us and lying about serious matters to all of us. These must be beliefs with a softer bedrock.

Both of the above beliefs have some plausibility. From 1932 to 1972, the government told 399 poor sharecroppers with syphilis that it was treating them when, in fact, it was letting their disease run its course to study it. If you know that and hear someone say the government did something like that with AIDS, it can sound like ... well, sure, could be. What did not happen sounds weird only if you don't know what did happen.

The government did try to keep a lid on the CIA warnings about Al-Qaeda, airplanes and buildings. Add that fact to popular theories about cover-ups in the assassinations of the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King. So, why not Sept. 11, 2001?

On both of these matters, however, there remain no unexamined, credible possibilities to support the majority beliefs. In short, you can't argue these beliefs with the usual assortment of facts and examples. They cannot be discussed intellectually if you start with a fixed belief. As a wise man said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

That principle is widely breached. Some interests profit from alleging that the media have a liberal bias, universities are hotbeds of humanistic socialism and you can't trust government. After all that whom do you believe? Yourself. You can swell with pride if you believe something smarter people don't even know about. You don't have to study your subject. That saves time and thought.

Take the example of the moment. You may never have looked into Darwin and doze off every time the preacher starts in on Genesis, but you have a right to your opinion, whatever it is. The Legislature came close to letting teachers in Florida teach their whatevers as science. And it did it in the name of freedom of thought. If that bill ever passes, no one should be stopped from teaching that the Bavarian Illuminati secretly run the Federal Reserve.

Another example: President Bush believes that he has a climate change policy and that it works. Hundreds of scientists who are part of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don't believe it. Who is right matters and will continue to matter.

Washington is safe from sacking because most of the people who hold opinions they call beliefs know that what they really have in their heads is iffier than Goldilocks. They can turn their beliefs on a dime if that makes them feel smarter or happier. They don't have real beliefs; they have assumptions. They never will try to blow the dome off the Capitol for an assumption.

Freedom of thought is helpful only when it protects honest thinking. Thinking means making distinctions among proven facts, accepted facts, probabilities, possibilities, matters of taste, and informed and uninformed opinions. If all you have is an uninformed opinion, you don't have enough material for a free thought. You don't even have enough to form a solid belief. But you do have enough to answer a poll question.

I'm not sure that we do ourselves a favor when we poll on opinions about facts and call them beliefs. That seems to confuse issues about which people already are confused - as the polls show.

Tom Blackburn writes for The Palm Beach Post.