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Piltdown
Skeptic Friend
USA
312 Posts |
 Posted - 01/02/2002 : 18:24:10
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Please make a point of reading the Paul Kurtz New Year's letter at the CSICOP website: http://www.csicop.org/list/listarchive/msg00309.html
Paul is one of the most active and distinguished leaders of the skeptical movement. In the letter he addresses the growing feeling among many skeptics that we are losing the battle, given the continued growth of irrational beliefs and religious extremism around the world. He refutes this defeatism by summarizing the achievements of CSICOP and its religious issues counterpart, the Council for Secular Humanism, during the past year.
Abducting UFOs and conspiring against conspiracy theorists since 1980.
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ljbrs
SFN Regular
USA
842 Posts |
 Posted - 01/04/2002 : 22:27:22 [Permalink]
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I do not get one bit frustrated by the numbers of irrational people. It has always been so, and I do not think that there is much that anybody can do about the total population all at once. However, individuals and small groups of individuals can be worked with and the movement will grow all by itself. There will always be the irrational (I call it a type of insanity). They were brought up with irrationality in their families, and it is not easy to change such individuals. However, people do change, and those who change are apt to educate their children with the change, leaving some true-believing in the past.
I think that Skeptical Inquirer has changed a lot of attitudes. I, personally, have little difficulty in finding rational, thoughtful people. The fact that they do not "grow on trees" is not a particular bother to me. Of course, dealing with terrorists has come to the fore recently. However, there have always been such groups. Perhaps the United States' involvement with the world regarding terrorism will change some of the irrational beliefs over to less severe and less dangerous irrational beliefs.
Irrationality is never going to disappear. It is a natural state of being for primitives. It is a kind of educated mental illness. Re-education will take time.
So, I do not fret about something which is slowly being changed. The big problem is in its magnitude. But wholesale irrationality (which, in a way, has been a *human* predicament) has always been there, so don't sweat it. Just keep chipping away at the foundations of ignorance. Do what you can.
ljbrs 
"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error." Goethe
Edited by - ljbrs on 01/04/2002 22:30:25 |
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