Oh, and one more thing…….

To volunteer at a hospice or as a firefighter is an extremely honorable endeavor. But so is teaching. What I do is teach. You may not like what you think I am teaching, or you may think that my teaching is merely pontificating, but that is because you do not understand the difference between an opinion and the ability it takes to form an opinion. I do not profess to teach the world my way, as if my way is the only right way. My philosophical and political views are only a part of my self-expression and they are the selfish part – the other part is my life-long desire to know and learn and to have other people know and learn, and specifically, to know how to learn and not be fooled – in other words, to know how to become a critical thinker. I want to teach that.

This site has definitions of what a critical thinker is, so I won’t bore you with that now, but as much as most of us think we think, we actually only half think. We take in information, process it and come to a conclusion about it, and so, we believe we thought. Critical thinking means you think about how you think, and consider all the hidden reasons you may have come to the conclusion you did. Never assume your thought process is pure. It is always colored by your life – and this is fine and there is nothing you can do to erase your experience from your thinking processes, but if you are aware that you have prejudices and if you can’t remove them from your thinking, at least you can acknowledge that your conclusions are not completely rational. This kind of self awareness is essential to be able to have a reasonable dialogue with anyone about anything.

I believe the world is in the sorry shape it is in precisely because people have never learned how to think. Irrational thinking, i.e. belief in myths and deities, is the cause of virtually ALL man-made suffering in the world. No matter how nice you think your religion is, no matter how righteous its tenets, your religion essentially says all other religions are wrong. There is nothing wrong with telling someone they are wrong but you can only do that if you can show why they are wrong. Scientists do this with each other all the time – that is what science and critical thinking is – finding evidence and proofs to support or rebut a claim. Religion can say it has evidence to support its claims (usually a book purported to be written by their deity) but if it actually did have some, then everyone would see the evidence, accept it, and accept the religion. But this does not happen. No religion, and no believer in religion will ever convince a believer in a different one that they are wrong. No amount of evidence will suffice because the person does not want evidence, they don’t need evidence, and they are afraid of evidence because they never learned what to do with evidence. They believe on faith, or because someone told them to, or because it is convenient, or for a thousand other reasons, but they do not believe in evidence. If they had evidence they would not believe at all – they would know. And because they do not know much about the world, even after 400 years of a science revolution, they remain ignorant and fearful. So they turn to their holy books’ wisdom and the wisdom tells them to go kill the non-believers.

It seems most people’s criticism of me making an issue of critical thinking and religion, etc. is that I am taking the fun out of people’s lives. Well, if not the fun, then the sense of security, and if not the sense of security then the sense of wonder and mystery. How wrong you all are. What is fun, secure, or mysterious about some big sky-daddy making and controlling everything? That seems pretty lame to me, especially considering the mess he has made of it all. Like, what is this deal that he makes someone – knowing full well in advance all that that person will do and become – but he let’s that person go on to become Hitler? Are you saying there was a plan behind that? Of course you are, because you do not know how to think – you only know how to believe in fairy tales and all the other stories your mommy tells you. Grow up.