What happens when rational thinking is disvalued in popular culture? You get people willing to swallow grade-A horse manure by the shovel-full all day long - providing the shoveller claims an invisible monster that lives in the sky told them to beg for more. $180 million USD was recently redistributed from the faithful to the clergy in a Ponzi scheme carried out in Florida (and elsewhere). If the people who got bilked had a background in rational thinking they would not have been robbed. Rational thinking tells you what Ponzi schemes are and that they don't work, ever. Rational thinking tells you that just because someone talks nonsense doesn't mean they know something you don't - that religion is a game of smoke and mirrors that doesn't do anybody any good that can't occur (sans fraud and force) in a secular fashion. How much does it cost to be more flexible as to whether 'A' really does equal 'A,' to 'keep an open mind' about religion? Maybe it's okay that if people decide to be stupid they get to suffer for it. But I'd like to think it's better to not be stupid and not to suffer.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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