We don’t take the time or effort to understand beyond the headlines. Headlines suggest and we fill in the gaps without any input. It just SHOULD be easy to understand, so we make it easy. It isn’t true, but it is truthy and easy to put in a headline.
Truthiness and its relation to Climate Change, the bee die-off, GHOs, organic gardening, police violence, bi-sexuality, our own understanding of logic, and lots more. Can you stomach the truth? Can you follow to the third paragraph of a news story?
If we can understand correlation is not cause we can begin. If today’s weather is due at whole or in part to the proven fact of global warming that has not been proven. Perhaps it SHOULD be true, perhaps one day we will find the cause of today’s weather (at whole or in part) but we have not. Bees are dying in record numbers. It is truthy that the die-off SHOULD be due to pesticides, but no one has yet found it to be so. Organic gardens have one third the pesticides in the produce as the supermarket variety product. Maybe that should NOT be true, but it is remarkably consistent tested result. Police are less likely to die on the job than farmers, electricians, loggers and construction workers. Police kill about 300 people for every police officer that dies as a national average. In order for a bisexual to validate her/his sexual nature as we are wont to do with gay and straight marriage, the bisexual needs to marry a person of each sex, at least two people.
Logic and reason give us the tools to test our beliefs in physical reality. We make a reasoned guess about things and then try out what we think should happen to see if your guess can be true. Secular reasoning puts faith in such an equation. Religious faith reasons that some non-proven but noble influence will change things at some future date.
If you are religious you are thinking of your future, of what might happen if you don’t follow your religion. There are countless examples, but the best known is going to heaven or hell. The prime modern apologist for the Christian Faith, C.S. Lewis, argues that we should act as though we are afraid of going to hell because that will show us how being religious will make us feel, presumable so much better that we will continue our Christian faith in a more sincere manner.
I am not denying the motivation such thoughts give us, or the vast quantities of good that are spread throughout the world by way of that thought process. I am merely comparing such motivation and philosophy with many new and motivational philosophies that have appeared in the world more recently than most religion.
One question is whether our laws and justice system should be based upon the freedom God gave us (so long as it does not infringe upon the freedom God gave others). If not, upon what do we base the law?
Laws against actions that do no hurt others are laws against personal freedom. There are laws against certain kinds of sex, prostitution, adultery, homosexuality, gambling, drugs and other risky behavior, I am sure the list goes on. These laws have been instituted to attempt to keep bad things from happening, to attempt to stop or change people’s behavior not because of what they have done or are doing, but because of what might happen if they continue to do it.
Of course I am not talking about human trafficking or pushing drugs. These crimes are aimed at making money for the perpetrator and taking away the free choice of the victim. If we have a free country we are allowed to do whatever we want so long as it does not affect
Religion is fear of the future, and so is pop philosophy.