"'I'm an atheist, BUT . . .' What follows such an opening is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or — worse — suffused with a sort of exultant negativity."
-Richrd Dawkins, The God Delusion-"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence."
-Cristopher Hitchens-
I want to start this blog with a post dedicated to the most dangerous enemy of reason: reasonable people.
It's not a typo, I mean it. People who act in an irrational and unreasonable way are usually just victims, because they recieved an indoctrination or just partial information about this or that area of knowledge, and have been led to use unreliable ways to look at reality.
I'm talking about those people who, even though they are capable of reasoning, they are so worried to appear offensive to anyone and bend over backwards to find an excuse and justify even the biggest intolerance.
I often speak with people who always try to justify the occasional barbarity practiced in this or that corner of the world in the name of this or that primitive culture just because criticizing it means that you will be labelled as "that guy who hates the people that holds that culture".
They have a very peculiar way of thinking indeed, because they can't see the difference between criticizing an idea and criticizing the person who holds that particular idea tout court.
As philosopher Peter Boghossian says, people deserve dignity, ideas don't, because one can hold a bad idea, but fortunately one can also be convinced and may eventually change his mind.
These people are totally capable of reasoning, they just don't bother because they think that suspension of judgement on certain topics is always the best way to go by default.
This, I believe, is moral cowardice, mainly driven by intellectual lazyness or shear dishonesty, because criticizing an idea means that you need to have some kind of arguments to back up your thesis, and this requires an effort, they are just unwilling to consider the possibility that some ideas might actually be dangerous for the society, and unlike most of the indoctrinated who didn't actually have any choice, should be considered responsible for the spreading of unreason in modern society.
This is what's going on in the zeitgeist of our times and another cause for that is the ghost of liberalism, which is now host of many parasite ideologies that watered down the radical ideas on which the original movement was based on, which changed it into blind political correctness. The tendency of tolerating intolerance that came with these parasitic ideologies is paving the way for fanaticism.
We created a superficial society, where good looking empty headed people and fast thinker smartasses are rewarded, while, on the other hand, thoughtful slow thinkers are labelled as lame and losers.
People value the cheap, cheesy feelings of a pop song conveniently forgotten after a couple of months rather than deeply awe inspiring stuff, and you know why? Because their life sucks balls! They are so focused on respecting and following all the constraints that society's conventions, expectations, traditions impose on them, they need this kind of stuff to get through the day. They can't realize that they have a word or two to say about how they want to live. If they derailed their life from the path society wants them to follow, and started acting like the product of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, dropping their moral cowardice, taking full responsibility for what they do, think and say, they would find out that life is not on rails, and that meaning in your life is not something that comes from the outside, or that somebody else must impose on you, but something you need to look for yourself.
This doesn't mean eternal bliss, it's still a rough ride, full of ups and downs, nontheless, it will be much more gratifying.
But here comes the big elephant religion. In the light of the discoveries that science and reason brought to us in the last 400 years, religion is so embarassing on its attempt to answer to the deep meaningful questions of life, that indirectly, even just attempting to answer these questions looks silly to modern day society, thus holding up people from thinking about these topics.
The problem here is the following: if you are not willing to tackle the deep questions of life such as how did we come to being, or what happens when we die, which have real implications on one's life*, you won't be able to find a direction, a meaning, forcing yourself back to the old customs of society.
But even when you finally decide to deal with these questions, if you don't use a reliable epistemology (reason and evidence) to find your way through reality, you will most likely be misled; but if you do use reason, you'll properly appreciate reality and find inspiration in deeper, jaw dropping things, no matter if you find them in art, scientific knowledge, litterature or whatever.
We are the universe experiencing itself, I'm sure humans can do much better than Justin Bieber to contribute to the show.
*Your attitude towards life should be greatly influenced by your belief about the afterlife, and if you think it shouldn't, well, I can only assume you didn't think it thoroughly.
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