Right to Believe and Feeling Attacked

Why is it that so many people, when confronted with a contrary opinion, feel it necessary to think their rights are under attack?  George Takei wrote a fantastic post on his Facebook fan page  that science is not a liberal conspiracy.  Reading through the comments, I saw someone replied, "So you're welcome to a belief but I'm not?"  It got me to wondering why so many people feel as though their right to believe something is being encroached upon when someone asserts a contrary belief.

 I've noticed this typically happens when someone's belief can be easily demonstrated to be false or whenever people hold their beliefs to define their existence.  Unfortunately for these people, they don't realize that accusing someone of abrogating their rights is not making a meaningful argument or refutation of the assertion.  Using this defensive tactic, they'll never know whether or not their beliefs actually line up with reality.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial

Exodus 21:20-21

"Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property."

Another Reason I Don't Want Anything to do with Religion

I've read this kind of story so many times:  "Devil Child:  Teenage Atheist Shares Her Story"

Kiss Hank's Ass

Christian Love Includes Death Threats and Rape

Here are some great examples of Christian peace and love.  These are viewer responses to a Fox News story about the American Atheists lawsuit over the cross at the Ground Zero memorial.  Atheists are threatened with rape and death for supporting the cross removal.

Stay classy, Fox News viewers.

Ireland Says "Hey, Hey, Hey. Goodbye!" to the Vatican

Ireland just announced it will be closing the Vatican embassy for not yielding any economic returns.

"Dublin's foreign ministry said the embassy was being closed because "it yields no economic return" and that relations would be continued with an ambassador in Dublin. 

The source said the Vatican was "extremely irritated" by the wording equating diplomatic missions with economic return, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values."

Does this mean the official government position in Ireland is now that Catholicism has no value?  One can hope.

Sir David Attenborough on Creationism

"My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'."

Objectivity and Subjectivity

So many people will assert a behavior as being immoral or disgusting because of their own personal feelings about it.  I felt compelled to write this post after reading the comments for a while on an Entertainment Weekly story about two couples on Glee that are going to be intimate for the first time.

"Gleeks you MUST tune in for next week’s episode of Glee, called “The First Time.” It’s without a doubt one of Glee's best installments ever and features two popular couples on the show having sex for the first time."

I found the story through the popular, conservative Drudge Report, so I knew the comments would be entertaining but incredibly frustrating.  What I noticed in many of the commenters is something I've often noticed is something about myself.  Too often I act as if my own personal feelings are an actual objective description of the world rather than my own subjective interpretation of it.  Observing how I feel about an issue tells me nothing more than how I'm reacting to it.  Unfortunately, most people seem to think their personal feelings are an objective description of reality.  Some examples from the comment section to demonstrate this:

DISGUSTING!  As if it's not disgusting enough to show teens who have no business having sex, have sex, now we have to see unnatural things taking place before our eyes."

 "This is disgusting. Homosexualists make a choice to do the vile things they do. Did you know evolution dosen't support the gay gene theory? Did you know gays are promised a special place in hell according to the bible? These perverts and thier unnatural acts only shame themselves and their worthless families that raised them. And only perverts will tune into watch kids sodomize themselves!"

"This is sick.  It's bad enough we have to sexualize our teenagers at such an early age.  Now, we have to intoduce them to gay sexuality.  What is next, beastiality?  Why not show teenagers saying no to sex, resisting temptation, showing virtuous behavior, or showing them being good citizens.  Now, I know some of you will say that the show is just displaying the reality of teen life.  My response would be there are still teenages with good moral values."

It's unfortunate that most people will never experience the freedom that comes from being able to discern their own subjective experience from objective reality.  From personal experience, it seems the ability to understand the difference is far from most people.  Most people either do not understand the distinction or refuse to make it after being told about it.

There is a fantastic book on happiness from a Buddhist perspective I would highly recommend to everyone:  Happiness:  A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.  It was from this book I learned that my own interpretation of the world had no relation to how the world actually is.  For example, if I find someone attractive or ugly, it's not an objective description of them.  It's how I feel about them.  I still get stuck in the trap of thinking my feelings are more than they are but it's helped me immensely.

I think the biggest difficulty in being an evangelical skeptic and atheist is that communicating new ideas to people who are completely resistive to them is incredibly difficult.  I try and try to get people  outside of the intellectual prison they have confined themselves to and yet they refuse to come out even though I'm holding the keys to them.  They refuse to think.

So often I encounter someone who, no matter how eloquently I explain something or no matter how well thought out my provocative questions are, simply shuts down a discussion with a snide remark or an assertion of fact without actually backing it up.

Who else feel like this?

Always a Classic

Always a classic story: a student determines hell is exothermic.