Feelings... Nothing More Than Feelings

It used to be that if you asked people to list places they'd like to travel, it was all but certain that a huge percentage of people would include Paris on the list.  Well, France in general has a reputation for being one of the great bastions of culture, philosophy, art, literature, and heck, gastronomy for that matter.  In days past, it was the hub for the likes of Sartre, Dali, Camus, Hemingway, Picasso, Beauvoir, and god knows who else.  Maybe that's why it was targeted last week -- cultural beacons that aren't advancing some morally bankrupt vision of backwards disgrace unto humanity are the single greatest enemy of religion.  For any religious fundamentalist, moral, intellectual, and social regression of mankind into a condition of universal detriment is the greatest possible good.

Aamir Khan recently met with backlash, as usual, for the crime of opening his mouth and saying things people didn't want to hear.  He brought up a sense that there was an atmosphere of growing intolerance in India...  Sure enough, he brought up a wide array of details and elaborated on the matter, but do you think a single person heard that?  Everywhere it was about taking it personally as if Aamir was somehow making a blanket statement.  How dare you spout an unpleasant truth, Aamir?  The boycotts and such, just as he saw from the furor over PK and/or the threats around Satyamev Jayate before only betray an abject lack of self-awareness when people shout -- "We're so not intolerant that we won't tolerate you saying anything bad about us!"  It was especially hilarious to see some other defenses like those who argued "If we're so intolerant, what about ISIS?"  That is a pouting child defending his transgressions by saying "That other kid down the street is worse, so that makes me awesome by default."

Then of course, you've got the Republican talking heads who, as a rule, spread lies in the course of their discourse about Planned Parenthood and promote more guns as the answer to gun problems, and are suddenly shocked that a Planned Parenthood gets attacked.  Naturally, they want to say "I didn't do anything"...  Never mind the outright falsehoods we spouted...  Never mind the propaganda of antipathy towards Planned Parenthood...  Never mind the bending over backwards for gun lobbyists...  People are responsible for how they're influenced by our rhetoric!  It's so unfair to blame the political demagogues who didn't do anything other than double down on fallacious bullshit!

Learning Could Hurt Too Many Feelings

Often times, liberals are associated with following the sort of namby-pamby consideration for "feelings" that creates the shift from using the word "cow" to using the term "Bovine-American."  We're not just supposed to be the guys who think socialism is awesome, but we also think the laws should outlaw the use of insulting language like "Chinese" in place of "Asian"...  as if that isn't technically disregarding the differentiation between multiple distinct cultures...  oh, well.  Strangely, liberal as I may lean, I'm not one of them.

Now I'm not about to say that we should forgo foul language, but that there's a line to be drawn.  There's a difference between using the N-word when referring to black people, and saying that creationism is idiotic.  A key difference here is that in one case, you're talking about people, and in another, you're talking about an idea.  Ideas don't have feelings to be hurt in the first place, and like all liberals, I do care about fairness.  The thing is that a lot of people presume that fair treatment of all ideas means they all get equal "time" and an equal "voice" in discourse...  hence why creationist fountainheads like the so-called Discovery Institute can work in lobbying for "academic freedom" bollocks.  Well, it doesn't quite work that way.  First of all, we can't just take ideas willy-nilly.  We need to be able to differentiate between fact and opinion, at the very least.  More importantly, treating ideas fairly doesn't mean open season for all ideas -- it means putting all ideas under equal scrutiny and upheld to the same intellectual standards.

Well, the fact that people who hold ideas on faith tend to hold them emotionally and without serious thought means it creates an avenue for people to say their feelings are hurt...  as if that puts the scrutiny off limits.  People who do this define "fairness" as whatever-works-out-in-my-own-benefit.  "We can be intolerant of gays, but it's unfair for people to rebuke our intolerance...  How dare you be so cruel to speak ill of our ignorant asshattery!"  I don't buy into this kind of crap.  Bad ideas deserve to be rebuked because they're bad ideas.  If it hurts your feelings because you hold bad ideas dearly on personal faith...  well, tough luck.  You held a bad idea.  Deal with it.

Are you against happiness?

Seriously?  I mean...  the "angry at god" thing wasn't enough?  I get questions that suggest I want people to be miserable?  I wonder if people just lash out because I'm proverbially pulling the beard off of the guy in the Santa suit or they simply don't get the point of being a rationalist.  It's not about happy vs. sad; It's not about hope vs. despair; It's not about moral vs. immoral; It's most certainly not about religion A vs. religion B; It's about fact vs. fantasy.  That's it.  There is nothing more to it than that.  I don't speak ill of religions because they do not occasionally teach otherwise valuable lessons;  I speak ill of them because they are fundamentally untrue, and believing that they are true is a bad thing that leads to other bad things.

I don't care how much your religious beliefs comfort you.  I don't care how big a difference Jesus or Sai Baba or Zarathustra or whoever has made in your life.  I don't care how happy you are to belong to some community of deluded psychopaths.  I don't care what sort of hope it brings you to believe in some divine form of justice.  And I certainly don't care about the sincerity with which you hold those beliefs.  None of these are important when establishing that any of these things are in any way true.

I refer to a quote by Penn Jilette on the matter --

"Believing something sincerely, without finding out if it is true, is actually a little worse than lying. It shits on the very idea of truth. To lie, you have to understand how to find out the truth, and then choose to fake it. To be sincere, you don't have to know anything. You just say whatever makes you feel good, and spin in smug circles in your tiny, fucked up little head... happy as long as you're true to yourself. In other words, sincerity is bullshit."

Well, I use that quote specifically to point out the irrelevance of any depth of belief.  I am a rationalist for a simple reason -- It is inherently better to be consistent with reality than not.

Feeling Over Fact

Deepak Chopra sickens me almost all the time.  Well, the feeling is mutual, or so I'm told.  When he posts things on his Twitter feed that he somehow caused some disastrous earthquake by way of the power of his meditation, it's easy to laugh it off and presume he's just babbling towards the goal of selling something.  If he was serious, I'd be glad to blame him for that rib I fractured during an earthquake not that long ago.  When he posts things on HuffPo about how skepticism itself is morally evil and bad for your health, I find myself unable to contain my anger.  Chopra values the emotional because he knows it is an easy avenue by which his brand of woo-woo hocus-pocus littered with criminal misuse of "quantum" terminology can be effectively sold to the unwashed masses.  Again, he's relying on the same old misrepresentation that every other anti-science moron spouts, but he goes to the further step that irrational thinking should be considered equally valid.

Even among the responses I got to my previous post on vegetarianism was that the emotional value is something that should not be discounted;  That because it is so fundamental to the nature of being human, we should seriously consider it and not brush it aside.  Now I'd like to know...  among any of the people who read that entry...  where did I actually say that?  I specifically spoke first about the moral arguments being divorced from reason.  I also got into the point about a simple fact that gets overlooked and how there is more than one way to address the issues.  Where the line gets drawn here is the end effect that listening to one's feelings on that matter could not have found you all the ways to skin a cat.

This is why I cannot possibly offer the slightest assent to Chopra's notion that emotional values and experiences should be considered equally valid.

There is a simple reality that I think everybody accepts with regards to emotions -- they are personal.  They are part of the fabric of individual experiences.  How this differs from rationality and reason is that reason does not try to write the description of truth on an individual level.  Because of this simple distinction, the two are not only different, but undeniably unequal.