"Are you *sure*?"

I will admit to being an elitist. I look at intelligence and education as our only possible hope of progress as a species. I see it as an antidote to ignorance, superstition, living in a fantasy where it is OK for one religious group to hate and kill another.

And replace the religious reasons for killing each other for a different set of random reasons for killing each other which somehow always come down to "it's us or them, we'd better make sure it's them." You're smart enough to figure this out but I'll say it again, war isn't caused by religion. The target is determined by religion, but the root cause of the war is a resource deficit and/or the desire to own something that doesn't belong to you. Eliminating religion only eliminates one of the sets of stupid things to fight over that humans routinely use to shelter themselves from why they're really fighting. After all, what sounds more civilized/less animal-like, "we're killing them because we want their oil-rich land" or "we're killing them in an attempt to bring enlightenment to the savages" or even "we're killing them to avenge the death of some random person who died centuries/millennia ago". One of those excuses is true, the others are just a pretty lie that helps people feel that they're really being the kind of unselfish, upstanding saints that they and/or society want themselves to be.

But when I witness the willing suspension of critical thinking - worse, the twisting of critical thinking to support irrationality - I feel like I am looking into a future in which the whole human race slides into an Alzheimer's-like dementia, unable to determine where we are, let alone where we're going.

Although to be fair it's not like the human race slides into an Alzheimer's-like dementia, that would imply they left it in the first place. The sad truth is that people who rely only on critical thinking to solve their problems are the aberration, not the norm. Now maybe that is just because they're badly educated, maybe if the schooling system was changed to include science from a young age, maybe if natural history were emphasized more than human history in schools there would be a difference. As it is you get human history courses every year of primary school, but you only get one (at most) natural history course. Now I know people keep arguing that "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" and I've got to wonder "why does that matter? even if someone takes a history class there's no guaranty that they'll get what's important important from the history class (namely the big picture, the whys, the basics of what happened) not the unimportant things (individual names, dates and places) that are often emphasized in history.

Maybe you guys could chime in on this thread on iidb.org where the religious contend, inexplicably, that faith does not mean believing in something to a degree of certainty unwarranted by the available evidence, and that only atheists think the word faith means that. They are either being dishonest or incredibly unobservant. Every time you back one of these dipshits in to a corner where there's no evidence, they play the faith card, "Well, it's a matter of faith, I just believe it, etc."

http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=218033

The user "seebs" especially should know better, he's been on there since 2002, and was once a moderator on that board. Bunch of equivocating dishonest squirmy little worms.

After my MIL got up from her nap this afternoon, had a snack, and went in to sit in the front room, we had a storm roll through. Nothing serious, but there was a bit of lightning and thunder. I went to check on her, and it was clear that she was anxious about something. I asked her if she was worried.

"I'm worried about the people."

"Which people?"

"The people who I was talking with. Before."

"Maybe that was a dream, MIL. You've been here all day."

"Oh, no, I was up on a hill. Talking with people. They told me to come back here."

(We live on the highest hill around, and she'd been no where.) "Well, maybe that was in your dream."

"No, it was at a house, up on a hill over there," She gestured randomly. "Will you take me up there? I want to make sure the people are OK."

"I'm sure they're fine."

"But you have to take me to go see."

And thereafter followed 40 minutes of discussion about not needing to take her 'over there' in the car so she could check to make sure the people of her dream were OK.

* * * * * * * * * * *

And therein lies the danger of this - those who have slipped off into dementia are demanding that we all go along for the ride, and that we take them to their imaginary places to see imaginary people and do imaginary things. Why? Because they're "sure".

Jim Downey

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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.