Godless Dave

Lisarea that was very cynical. And 100% on target of course.

My opinion? Not wilfully stupid. Just plain stupid. Their minds are ruled by emotion instead of reason and they don't see anything wrong with that.

lisarea

I have to admit, it's time for me to step up my anti-misanthropy regimen. Look for common ground. What I like to call the "Fluffy bunnies are cute" approach.

I may run for public office on this controversial platform. Yes, indeed, I'll have a groundswell of popular support when I unveil my soft, airbrushed campaign photos of widdle bunny wabbits.

If people were literally this stupid, though, we'd trip over them drowning in mud puddles every day. We'd see people wearing their pants on their heads and breaking their teeth trying to eat rocks. But that almost never happens.

I think, at the heart of it, they're intellectually lazy. If they can get dressed in the morning and remember not to walk in front of traffic, they have the core intellectual capacity to understand an argument as simple as this. They just don't want to. If they can do simple addition and read at a third grade level, they are capable of understanding the arguments. And I think when you look at the many fanciful and convoluted arguments they come up with to support their emotional reactions, you'll see that there are some synapses firing in there. It's just that they're selfish and lazy (which are often linked), and don't have the basic integrity required to come to a conclusion based on anything but selfishness.

I could actually respect someone who lacked fundamental intellectual ability, but made an effort to understand things. I think most of these people do have the tools required to understand, but they just don't use them. That makes me sick.

Maybe I'll just stockpile beer and go live in the woods. You coming, Dave?

Godless Dave

Sounds like my kind of plan! Are we in a hurry? If not I can have some homebrew ready in about 3 months.

Alonzo Fyfe

"Lazy" is still too kind a word.

Somebody who is "lazy" (in the couch-potatoe sense) does not hurt anybody but themselves. And I really can't find much of a cause to be angry with them. If they prefer the consequences of sloth to that of effort, that is up to them.

Rather, this type of "lazyness" is like that of the pilot who bypasses an inspection of his airplane before taking passengers to their location. This qualifies as reckless endangerment -- a moral crime.

Coincidentally, I just posted an essay on this topic in my Ethics Without God series -- Part V.

Majestyk

Heya's. Hope you don't mind me throwing my opinion in on this subject.

What it all boils down to is this: Insanity is the natural state of humankind.

themistocles

I've said it before, but I can't believe this is an issue. It seems like such a childishly small thing and I find it only as potentially socially destructive the bigger a deal gets made out of it. I don't particularly feel oppressed with saying "under God". There, I said it, I don't feel so bad off. Likewise, I could care less if it didn't include it. Great, a chant minus two words, my day has been sped up.

And I don't think this will be the case, but the bigger a deal that gets made out of this, the more I side with pro-under God in the fear that the last thing we need is one more hurdle for educators to keep their jobs over. I doubt it'll come to that, but if we have to send this to the big courts, then it's closer to that reality than any sensible person can consider comfortable.

Alonzo Fyfe

It is an issue to me that the Government has children every day say that I am morally equivalent to separatist/rebels, tyrants, and perpetrators of injustice.

I have worked very hard to live a moral and honorable life, yet I must live surrounded by this insult.

It actually does not matter to me if anybody actually says the pledge.

If the government were to simply pass a resolution saying that "We officially declare that all real Americans hold that the following four groups stand against the principles of this flag and the republic for which it stands: Atheists, Rebels, Tyrants, and Perpetrators of Inustice," and nobody ever read the resolution out loud, it would still be an insult, and one would be an injustice worthy of a great deal of contempt.

That it is made a matter of public pledge simply adds injury to insult.