Many of us favor asking questions over blind faith

To the editor:

In connection with the impending action against Iraq, my thoughts keep going back to one of Jacob Bronowski's last episodes in his series, "The Ascent of Man," where he is standing in a pond at the site of one of the Nazi death camps containing the ashes of many of the Holocaust victims.

He questions what the fundamental attitudes and forces were that brought about this tragedy. Some would blame a cold, scientific attitude which reduced people to just numbers, but he claimed that science was not the culprit here. The people who did this were completely convinced that they were absolutely right. They never questioned the authority or assumptions for their actions as opposed to a scientific attitude where everything is questioned.

At the present time we are being told to trust our leaders since they supposedly have more information at their disposal and are making the correct moral judgments, but it seems that many of us here and in the rest of the world are questioning that faith.

HARLAN E. FIEHLER

Cape Girardeau