Inner-space part 10- Superstitions: The Awakening!

The original.

Well, here's another one I don't take back.
Superstitions are still dumb, and bad for you.


And when it's the other guy's superstition, everyone including the superstitious agrees with me.

Well, this original rant summed it all up, really.

But, I had to (at least felt I did) pump out a crapload of other rants on religion to hammer down all the religious arguments I was having to repeatedly answer at RD.net that I was getting sick of; and to preempt some really stupid ones floating around.

That way, I can just cut and paste the fucking things when I need to.

Anyway, all of that boiled down to Dicky-pedia, which boiled down further to the Dicky-pedia rant.

Which I retroactively consider the sequel to the superstition rant.

Which would make this the threequel I guess.

So anyway, I said it all, and beat it to death on religion.

In the end, like the end of Scooby Doo, when you look at it, it's always some asshole in a mask.

And, the debates on religion all boil down to this.

That's my big take-away on religion.
I spent a long time gawking at it.
Not like I didn't give it a chance.

So anyhoo, the antidote to it, at least for some people, it was for me, and several others, is critical thinking.
And since I wrote the original superstition rant, I devoted a whole label section to critical thinking, and have stuffed it full of wonderful goodies.

Enjoy.

Anyway, the roots of religious superstition, come from how our brains work, and this video in the critical thinking section shows it all better than I could.

Why we believe in Gods.

But, given the brain is so fundamentally prone to illusions, I don't ever expect to live in a world free of religion, much less superstition, in my lifetime.

But it can be managed.

We can spread the word, get closet atheists to come out, get fence sitters to jump off the fence on the side of rationalism, and spread skepticism and encourage the scientific way of thinking to everyone, religious or no.

Oh, and of course, fundie-whacko religious shit has has to whupped in the political debate.

There are religious moderates who can agree there.

That's the thing, there has to flat-out be more skepticism in the discourse, period.

Too long have the Miss Cleos, and the Jonathan Edwards's been allowed to run amok in our culture.

It's getting really fucking bad when History, and Discovery, are getting taken over by ghost shit, and UFO shit, and Bigfoot shit, and there's a Ghost-Hunter show on Sci-Fi Channel.

Shit, Nickelodeon has a show with children Ghost-Hunters.

Horrific.

Skepticism is needed badly.

Everywhere.

Superstition is probably never leaving us as a species, but that doesn't mean we can't try to mitigate its influence.

We have lots of other primal impulses, but we mitigate those to have a society.

Fine, believe the world is flat, and that swarms of mosquito sized Pegasuses swarm around your head.
But when the Pegasuses ask for money, or blood, or the minds of children, time to throw tomatoes at you.

S'all I'm saying.