People who ignore facts, and those who don’t

Posted by: Jeremy Reimer on Fri Sep 23 18:05:59 2011.

Recently I argued with someone over a crucial decision at work. I presented over four decades of scientific studies proving my point, which were ignored and dismissed in favor of "belief" that the opposite was true.

It was depressing to me that people actually think this way. I wondered how humanity actually managed to achieve everything it did when we clearly are not a logical species.

Then I thought to myself: are there any classes of people who DO accept facts a majority of the time? And there are. They are scientists, engineers, and computer programmers. If they can’t accept facts, they can’t do their job.

These people BUILT our civilization. Everyone else is just living in it.

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By AllYorBaseRBelong2Us on Mon Oct 3 14:11:39 2011


what was the debate about?

Issue is that we the people are heavily invested in ideologies. Ideologies are something that can define the *Self* while facts are usually just one type of stepping stone (or stumbling block) towards an ideology.

This is not necessarily bad given that knowledge can evolve and hucksterism can run rampant. We have a need to protect ourselves from an unexpected onslaught of upsetting facts before we can allow ourselves to accept them as truths.

Patience and long suffering is the way to convince people, and at our ages changes to the *Self* is best done with much contemplation.

By OscarWilde on Mon Oct 3 20:25:37 2011

I’m not going to get into this subject, considering the checkered past on this forum (as in any other forum for that matter); but honestly, of all the debates and heated arguments on this forum and another other ones I’ve been a part of, or just read from a distance, it did not prepare me for the myopic fundamentalist views I read from some random facebook live news feed.

As we know FB recently has the annoying live news feed. And I saw this one news feed from a friend who replied to a post made by a friend of his. Some very angry black dude, very pro-christian, very anti-homosexual, and very very anti-white. Now I’ve seen all sorts of racist stuff before, but this guy, wow: His world view was:

White people introduced abortion, homosexuality, and guns to black people to control their population. I’m not gonna get into the full details of it, but suffice to say, my jaw just dropped. I’ve heard the gun stuff before, but abortions and homo-sexuality. Holy conspiracy theory batman!

Anyway, so as the discussion between this guy and his friends continue, all his arguments quote scripture. ’HOMOSEXUAL IS EVEL!!! quotation from bible to fit the argument’ ’WHITE MAN IS THE DEVILLL!!!!!! quotation from the bible...’
After a while I finally got the constant scripture quoting: this guy eventually said there are evil truths and there are good truth, and his truth is good truth, god’s truth, and he knows its true because of scripture. My jaw dropped again. The conviction and the self delusion behind that statement:
"There are truths, evil truth and good truths and I know my truth is good!"


I didn’t debate with this guy because there’s no point. I saw my friend and his friend trying to point out the racism and hate in his message and it was all twisted into self victimized, being misunderstood, Madanesque like rebukes.

Oh and White people made black Jesus white!!!! I wanted to ask what kind of black was Jesus? Nigerian? Kenyan? South African? And when did blacks in America find out about Christ? And other the urban myth that jesus christ is believed to be white even tho most paintings even from middle ages Europe tend to paint Christ as dark skinned (tanned at least) and dark hair, and features not the typical of Europeans. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painting of Christ and thought to myself, ’oh he looks like he could be from Manchester England, the bloody anti-liverpool poofter!’

But anyway, there is more to this guy, and it’s just one scary conspiracy theory after another. The other was Hitler was Rotschild (I had to google to find out what that meant)... or something like. Some super rich jewish family that controls the world.

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Oct 4 11:18:06 2011


what was the debate about?

I can’t really go into it on a public forum. Suffice it to say that there were two answers, and one had four decades of scientific research proving it was the better one, and the other one had... belief.

For most humans, belief wins every time. We defend our beliefs to the death, no matter how crazy they are (see OscarWilde’s story).

Those who manage to get past that, and search for truth over belief, well, maybe you can get to help build civilization. If not, you just get to talk. A lot.