I just had someone over on my YouTube channel criticize me because I’m insulting people who believe in gods. They are a believer and even though they agree with me on so-called “church people”, I should stop telling people to stop using their emotions.

Except that’s not what I’m doing and someone really misunderstands pretty much everything I’m saying. So here I will explain.

The fact is, I’m not going after “church people”. I’m going after irrationality. It’s why the subtitle on my channel has been “exposing stupidity wherever it hides” for years. It’s why believing things for bad reasons, especially when you know they are bad reasons, that’s nothing to be proud of. Yet that is exactly what this individual is doing and they don’t want to hear it.

Now I’m not saying that there is never a time for emotions because clearly there is. Emotions are baked into our very makeup. The goal here is not to excise our feelings permanently, it’s to recognize the essential limitations of emotions and to use them when appropriate and not when not. Whether anyone likes it or not, your feelings have nothing to do at all with reality and if you’re trying to feel your way through life, especially when it applies directly to the real world, you’re doing absolutely everything wrong.

That’s the point.

Your feelings have absolutely nothing at all  worthwhile to say about the force of gravity or the speed of light or evolution. Those things are true because we have evidence that they are true. How you feel about any of it is entirely irrelevant A rational person can set aside their feelings, no matter what they are, and deal with the facts at hand. An irrational person cannot. It is why my channel, my blog and pretty much everything I’ve done as a skeptical individual for decades of my life has been about exposing irrationality and stupidity to the world. This is not how anyone ought to behave.

Yet many people do and that’s unfortunate. I’m not mad at these people, I’m just pointing out that they are doing intelligence wrong. Most of them don’t care. That doesn’t change anything. Reality is reality no matter what you believe. Your feelings don’t matter. That’s the operative point. It’s why I spend so much time pointing out the difference between how religion operates and how reality operates. Reality doesn’t care about your feelings. I don’t care how much you want to believe the Earth is flat, you’re wrong. The evidence isn’t there to support it. I don’t care how much it appeals to you to think the Earth is the center of the universe. You’re wrong. The evidence just isn’t there for your belief. And I don’t care how much you want to believe in a god, there isn’t any good reason to take that belief seriously, thus you should not hold it.

And that bothers a lot of people, if you notice. But that doesn’t matter because reality doesn’t give a damn about your feelings. This is all about separating emotions from reality. You can’t feel your way to discovering anything objectively true. It just doesn’t work that way. If you are concerned with whether the things in your head are true or not, then you need to recognize that feelings don’t mean a damn thing. Only facts do. You can either step back from your blind faith or you can’t. If you can, you’ve got a chance.

If not, you’ve already lost. That is truly sad.