Let’s say something that a lot of people just don’t like. You are a ball of meat. You owe your very existence to a 3-pound lump of flesh in your head. Your body is just a life support system for the meat sack that makes you who you are. If that meat gets damaged or dies, so do you.

Welcome to reality. Yet the fact remains that a lot of people get really upset when you point this very simple fact out. Why is that?

I can’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had of late over what actually constitutes humanity. This tends to make a lot of people really upset. The simple fact is, as I’ve said before, that humanity is an irrelevant species on an irrelevant planet in an irrelevant solar system, orbiting at the end of the spiral arm of an irrelevant galaxy. We just don’t matter to anyone but ourselves. When we inevitably go extinct, as all species eventually do, nobody is going to miss us. It’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever know that we were here.

Yet that bothers a lot of people, both religious and otherwise. For the religious, often, that is one of the reasons that the religion exists, to deal with the ultimately irrelevancy of human existence. They want meaning and purpose where none demonstrably exist.

Except there isn’t any that we can prove to be there. I get it though, lots of people have very strong emotional reactions and I’m not saying that’s wrong, per se. We’re just 3-pound meat sacks that operate on electrochemistry. Of course we have emotions. It’s part of our biological makeup. We’ve also developed the ability, at least most of us have, to push those emotions aside and to operate on intellect. This is where we have issues, however, because while everyone, at least those without brain damage, ought to be able to set aside their feelings and think critically, there are a lot of people who choose not to. They’d rather feel their way through life instead of think.

Well too bad. We shouldn’t accept that. Emotions, while necessary, are also where all of our darker impulses come from. It’s where we get wars and violence and human suffering. It’s where people do because they want, not because they’ve carefully considered the ramifications of their actions.

That’s almost always where the problems in discussion of this sort come in. It’s because people insist on feeling rather than thinking.

I’m rather tired of that.

Of course, I’m not saying that you should try to eliminate emotions from your life. You are, after all, nothing more than a ball of electrochemical reactions. It’s impossible to completely excise the biological burden that evolution has placed on your shoulders. However, you need to be able to differentiate between what you feel and what you rationally evaluate about the world around you. There is a difference.

You are just an animal. You might be a debatably smart animal but you are an animal nonetheless. That means that you can try, but by no means succeed all the time, but you can try to see the larger picture beyond yourself. You can see survival as more than something that happens day-to-day. You can see the potential problems coming and try to avoid them. That doesn’t mean that you’ll always be successful, but you can at least make an attempt. Yet far too many people, they never seem to reach that level of cognitive function. They’re satisfied to just feel their way through life.

As such, they do a demonstrable disservice to us all.

Something else I’ve brought up before is the fact that, the first step in becoming a rational, intelligent, critical-thinking adult is coming to grips with your place in the universe realistically. It’s not the fanciful notions that you were raised with, you have to learn to separate those from the objective reality, it’s what’s actually going on, at least as close as we can get at this stage in our human development. If people could do that, we’d be golden. You’d have very few wars because people would consider their options rationally. Throwing bombs and bullets at each other is rarely the best way to solve a conflict. There would be no religion. People would have moved on from their fantasy stage to understanding that it’s all just made up. We’d have no racism, sexism or hatred based on immutable human characteristics. Those don’t get us anywhere. People are people, no matter what they look like on the outside. I have no idea what we’d do with ourselves if there wasn’t anyone left to hate for bad reasons.

Yet we don’t do that. Instead, we get groups of people, clustering together, pretending their emotional overreactions are better than the emotional overreactions of the people over there. It’s a bunch of people throwing childish temper tantrums without the capacity to step back from their emotions and just consider the facts rationally.

Because who would want to do that, right?

It’s why my tagline around here has always been “Exposing Stupidity Wherever it Hides”. It isn’t just religion, although that is a major source, it’s an irrational humanity that can’t just deal with the world the way that it is. It’s people who just don’t care what’s actually going on because their emotions constantly get in the way.

I find that entirely sad. Maybe it’s time for humanity to grow the hell up. We’re certainly not going to get anywhere worthwhile until we do.