“With, without.
And who will deny its what the fightings all about?”
-Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, Us and Them

So Bill Maher’s Religulous put me in the tailspin that I expected it would. We have roughly 1.5 to 2 billion people fighting over the existence of 14 million. One side believes they need to die, the other believes they need to overcome… and then there’s confusion with the temple of the mount and wailing wall. Frankly, I don’t get it, but I do understand history, and George Santayana - “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

One of the core tenants about Religulous isn’t about the stupidity of religious people (yes, I call it stupidity), but the need to confront these people, like a psychiatrist guides a patient to confront their issues. I wonder how many psychologists and councilors go home after a long day’s work and think, “What a bunch of stupid fucking ‘tards?”

I was chatting with a good friend about why other terrorists don’t get on planes, land in the US and start blowing themselves up. I believe its because once you get to the US, it’s a completely different Earth than the rest of the world. Yeah, we’re imperialistic assholes that have a penchant for bombing brown people.

NPR’s All in the Media today ran a piece on how cable news is fracturing the need to be unbiased. We’ve known for a long time that Fox is an unbiased source, but the reason why people watch it is because it wont challenge their “views” - it’s never going to show a soldier crying as his face gets shot off. We listen to the music we like most. We watch the shows we like the most. We subscribe to the earthly world view that makes us comfortable.

The difference between faith and rationalism is that faith requires you to lie to yourself and hope for the best. Rationalism forces you to prepare, and sometimes causes nihilism which is an emotional land of hopelessness. JMS has an important saying here, but there’s something I use to address hope in a life of reason.

Human’s evolved on this planet for 200,000 years and have roughly 50,000 years of culture. While atheism has been around on and off for thousands of years, it’s rarely been a political movement, and when it’s been included as a tenant of politics, well, how do YOU summarize Soviet Russia and Soviet China? Not the most enlightend of societies.

And slowly, atheists are fighting to gain hold of people’s hearts and minds, but… I wonder if it’s worth it? Once you reject your dominant culture, you’re very likely to not want to join groups again without a healthy skepticism. So, not only do we have to move extreme believers to less irrational, but we also have to move the less irrational to the skeptic, and the skeptics to the active atheistic culture.

The Bright movement is one way for “conciousness awareness” - and it’s doing a very good job at it, but it’s not going to be enough. There’s literally billions of monotheists out there which can’t, won’t or are not allowed to go to the-Brights.net, let’s alone access to the internet.

Plus, there’s the last issue: no one likes being told that their big, invisible buddy is a myth. When you do, you risk death, anger, and other stupid responses. Very few atheists I know have the missionary spirit in them: “Sir, have you heard the good word about Darwin?” seems that it just wont work, does it?

(To be continued)