On 1/19/2011 8:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> So there again, I don't think it's necessary to be offensive to those who
> are happy to believe that some supernatural power intervened - whether
> that's the case or not.
>
> Jim
The problem is.. It doesn't just stop at them using it to effect their 
*own* lives. Failure to recognize that it is a form of applied reasoning 
(and I would argue that isn't always the case, since you need data to 
reason from, and religion tends to reject wide ranges of data and 
sources), leads people to trying to make decisions for *others* based on 
the same reasoning. It also leads them, invariably, to false 
equivalencies, failure to understand what they are actually advocating 
for/against, etc. We spent decades in the US, far more than any other 
country in the world, being "nice" to the religious, religious views, 
religious interpretations, and telling everyone, "We respect the wacky 
shit you believe!", we got fundamentalists, George Bush, Sarah Palin, 
and the Tea Party, oh, and some bozo trying to build an Ark in Kentucky, 
and whining about conspiracies, every time real experts, instead of his 
own friend, claims his "attendance and income projections" are even more 
fictional than Genesis.

Oh, right, and it also plays in to the hands of quack psychology, quack 
pharmacology, quack gizmos, modern patent medicine gibberish, and all 
the rest of the stuff, which preys in the same inability to tell the 
difference between confirmation bias, placebo, and/or what their own 
brain is doing, versus "quantum, spiritual, all natural, suplimental, 
toothpaste", or what ever they have made up this week to sell the same 
fools.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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