I keep telling myself that I won’t respond to this because it isn’t going to change anything, but every once in a while, I have to, because this time, it wasn’t just once. I could ignore it if it was once. It was twice in a row that Matt Dillahunty lost the intellectual thread and started ranting.
Come on, can we just stop? Please?
So I was watching a couple of videos from the last Atheist Experience and I know that’s not really worthwhile a lot of the time. As time has gone on, I think Matt Dillahunty has been less and less effective overall. Maybe he’s just heard it all and he’s sick of listening, I don’t know, but he treats people like dirt most of the time and he clearly isn’t listening to what anyone has to say.
That is true nowhere more than when it hits his hot button issues. Then, he’s just making a fool of himself and that was true twice today. First off, in this video, someone calls in and eventually, says they don’t believe in vaccines. Matt flips his lid, rants for a while and then hangs up on the guy without ever trying to hear *WHY* he thinks that. Because the whole purpose of the show, for years on end, has been “what do you believe and why?” But why doesn’t matter when Matt’s emotions get enraged.
Now I don’t think for a second that the caller had any good reason for the position that he held, but who knows? It isn’t like we even got to hear him try. He might have had a good reason, which is unlikely, or he could have made a complete fool of himself. Matt just hung up on him, thus ignoring the entire point for having a call-in show in the first place. Whether he likes it or not, this isn’t The Matt Dillahunty Show. It is a product of the Atheist Community of Austin. I know he treats it like it’s his, like he’s the face of atheism everywhere, but that’s just not true. You don’t get to play fast and loose with the “rules” just because you get butthurt. You have to treat every call the same.
I might have just let that one go because that’s pretty common, but the very next call, linked here, was essentially the same thing. I’m not going to agree with the caller because Gohan has called in many times before and I’ve been entirely unimpressed, but it was an interesting question that Matt just freaked out over and refused to consider it intellectually. Why? Because the topic of slavery came up and Matt is incapable of handling that rationally.
So let’s set aside everything that Gohan said for a moment and ask this question purely theoretically. That’s what these are, after all, theoretical philosophical questions, like the trolley problem, that don’t actually affect reality at all, they just test how we are going to react to the extremes proposed. In fact, this is very much like the trolley problem so it would have been interesting to see Matt’s take.
But we’ll go even farther afield. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we found a small South Seas island with 24 people on it. I just picked 24 out of the blue. Those people have never known cancer. They are completely immune to all forms of it. Let’s assume, again for the sake of argument, that we can extract that ability from those 24 villagers, but the only way that it can be done is to sacrifice them all. It will produce a serum that will completely wipe cancer in all of its forms from the face of the planet. What do you do?
I’m going to make it easier so people like Matt can handle it. We will assume that these people aren’t black. I know he has a problem with anyone supposedly “disenfranchised” or anything like that. They can be the whitest, blond-haired, blue-eyed motherfuckers you ever wanted to see. Hell, you can say they bow down to a statue of Hitler if that makes you feel better. I don’t care. Do those 24 people die to save the estimated 10 million that die from cancer every single year, or do we let cancer keep claiming victims? What do you do?
Now I’m not going to answer because it isn’t really about the answer here. Like I said, this is like lining people up on the tracks for the trolley problem. Some people are going to die, there is absolutely no way that you can stop it, you just have to pick who.
Yet in the call I’m referencing, Matt just went off the trolley rails and started ranting because he got his fee-fees hurt. This is one of his bugaboo issues that he simply can’t get past. He can’t. It’s getting in the way of his ability to rationally field calls because I think everyone can see it except him and his acolytes. It’s why we see so many people calling in about slavery because they know they can make Matt flip his lid. He lacks the ability to just step back and realize how he’s reacting. I don’t think he can help himself. I don’t even know that he’s aware that he’s doing it.
Honestly, they either need to stop taking these calls or he needs to be man enough to take a step back, shut off his camera, keep his mouth shut and let his co-host take it, or he needs to stop being on the show. I know that’s not going to happen because it’s clear that this is just feeding his ego, but when it comes to moral questions, I don’t think he can talk about it without getting emotionally involved and that’s becoming a massive problem. If you’re going to put yourself out there as a representative of atheism or of an atheist community or, really, anything but yourself, then you need to be in control of your emotions and we’ve seen far too many cases recently where he’s allowed his personal life to interfere with his job as a proper show host. He has been compromised by his feelings and I think people are terrified to pull him aside and tell him that.
But what do you think? Can you watch those two videos referenced above and think that he reacted rationally and unemotionally? Maybe you think I’m wrong. Let me know in the comments below.
I do not doubt it. Matt always accuses theist of refusing to listen to anyone that disagrees with their religious beliefs.
AX has a video where a caller asked Matt and the other host how to welcome conservative atheists into the atheists community. Well right off the bat Matt went off the rails saying if there was a conservative atheist in the room he would leave the room, unwilling to listen to their point of view. Matt like most liberals is a double standard hypocrite. I Here’s one of his rants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXAdNOwDskI
Aron Ra is another hypocrite. He finds it hard to make a video debunking religious claims without attacking conservatives/Republicans. He flat out told me in replies that everything wrong in the country is the fault of conservatives/Republicans and the left does nothing wrong.
Remember, Matt is a member of the party that owned people.
Yeah, but they never want to talk about that. I really think Matt has some issues about applying his personal life to his “intellectual” pursuits. The second he started dating Arden, he got really concerned with people’s pronouns. Nobody gives a damn. If you want your call screeners to ask so that the hosts use them properly, fine, but there’s no need to announce them. I think there’s one repeat caller who is purposely trolling the show that way. It’s just ridiculous and makes them look like idiots.
A lot of them are hypocrites. I mean, when I posted on the video, saying that Matt should have at least given the anti-vaxxer a chance to defend their views, I got attacked by a bunch of left-wing whackos saying that anti-vaxxers should never have a platform to speak. Yeah, so much for “what do you believe and why?” right! Because as much as these people complain about bigots, they are some of the biggest bigots around. If you can’t have a conversation with people you disagree with, then who is the dishonest interlocutor in the room?
Matt gets triggered when someone mentions slavery. Yet he is a member of the party that owned slaves.
Remember folks, it’s Matts’ party that were the slave owners.
Cute, but I would knock it off. The Dixie-crats are now the Republicans.
You are being as disingenuous as Matt.
Both parties are complete crap these days.
I completely agree that Matt has lost 90% of his effectiveness. He has a hair-trigger as you’ve noted and he has recently taken to personal insults and affronts at his opponents in the persona of “the aggrieved innocent” whose “righteous indignation” has been trampled. It’s an old act and it gets older every time he puts it on.
Very true. Unfortunately, a lot of people see him as an “official representative of atheism” of sorts and he’s just not a good example IMO. He had a good run but maybe it’s time for him to retire. He makes a big deal about doing TAE for 16+ years, but what he’s doing right now, they are nowhere close to his best and perhaps he ought to go out while he’s remotely ahead.
This is what happens when you get too much influence for too long, to the point that you’re not being held accountable for the crap that you say anymore.
re: so many people calling in about slavery because they know they can make Matt flip his lid.
Yes, in the two videos referenced, Matt didn’t react rationally or unemotionally. I agree. It is so hard because people will tell any lie to try to cover for God’s approved slavery and after a while it is maddening but steamrolling people doesn’t advance the conversation.
-Oh, by the way, on your latest, Pastor Dave Earley: Why Reality?
Well, I had to give up trying to post. The YouTube algorithm didn’t like so, so many of the things I said or the way I said them. No number of edits fixed anything. Anyway, posting here instead:
Spot on as always, —spot on! So, the test for Christianity comes down to seeing how little evidence one can believe on? Well, for Dave and others that seems a very sorry gift to return to the “creator of human intelligence!” They claim God gave us strong, rational reasoning abilities. So the key to understanding in life is to shut them all down and believe something that looks totally made up with little, to basically no evidentiary support (—especially primary sources for the level of claims involved)?
re: keeping people in the seats and the money rolling in.✔ If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” seems the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when someone just goes ahead and believes and claims to know anyway.
And it is so difficult for Pastor Dave to understand reality when his livelihood, his worldview, his emotional comforts, his you-name-it all depend on him not understanding reality. Wanting things to be true is very powerful especially if your social network and the money your making are tied to it.
It’s just happening so often these days, where people will call in just to see him freak out and he performs on cue every single time. The second the subject comes up, or any of his other emotional bugaboos, he’s just showing the world the bad side of Matt Dillahunty and unfortunately, that tends to reflect badly on the rest of us. I’ve heard “but Matt Dillahunty said…” more times than I care to recall and I don’t care what he says. I care what the evidence says, but he’s becoming an excuse for the religious who figure they can troll us and we’ll all just flip our lids.
I try to manually approve anything that goes into the moderation filter but there are times that I don’t even see those. Sometimes it takes a day or two, I don’t check every day but I try to kick things through as soon as I see them. What happens from then on, that’s completely on YouTube’s head. There are things that just disappear and I never see them again.
That said though, I think it’s getting pretty clear what the impetus is for most of the apologetic activities. It’s all about the money and not really about the faith. The second that people start doing this stuff as a living and not as a calling, it gets automatically corrupted. It’s all about ad revenue and Patreon backing and all of that and the message itself gets lost. Even for crazy people like Pastor Dave, and there’s another one coming up soon and that’s a hoot, trust me, they are either completely out of their minds or they are just looking for a following and a paycheck. It’s been that way all the way back to the first century CE. People like Craig and J. Warner Wallace, they like to say there was no profit motive, but the early church leaders were certain to call for donations, mandatory donations, right into their pockets from early believers. Funny how they don’t want to acknowledge any of that.
re: he’s just showing the world the bad side of Matt Dillahunty and unfortunately, that tends to reflect badly on the rest of us.
Very True, it is so counterproductive. Anybody can become angry. That is so easy to do, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way —wow, that is not within everybody’s power and is a real skill indeed.
re: he’s becoming an excuse for the religious who figure they can troll us and we’ll all just flip our lids.
Yeah, I hate that. But as I have warned some: You say you follow the New Testament, well then, you ought to understand that there is something sinful about “Christians” just provoking people for sport. But yes, we can rain on our own parade just by failing to rein in our emotions.
re: I try to manually approve anything that goes into the moderation filter but there are times that I don’t even see those. Sometimes it takes a day or two, I don’t check every day but I try to kick things through as soon as I see them. What happens from then on, that’s completely on YouTube’s head. There are things that just disappear and I never see them again.
Thank you. It is truly amazing how many posts just disappear.
re: People like Craig and J. Warner Wallace, they like to say there was no profit motive, but the early church leaders were certain to call for donations, mandatory donations, right into their pockets from early believers. Funny how they don’t want to acknowledge any of that.
Oh, absolutely. The first Christians in Egypt who spoke Egyptian Coptic (ancient Egyptian but it is written in the Greek alphabet), and early Syriac Christians, all seemed in it for the money and control. I will not put the original languages here and then translate them but here is the bottom line: If you do not give regularly and sacrificially to your local Egyptian or Syriac church, it is high time you did. When it comes to financially supporting God’s work (really their lifestyle), giving to your church is just the beginning!
See, that is a huge difference. They can’t be honest about why they do it.
I’m not upset that he gets angry, only that he gets angry so consistently that people can troll him like he’s a puppet on a string. He’s certainly not the only one with this problem because I can name a couple of other people over at the ACA that have their own very specific triggers and the second the topic comes up, they’re off, ranting and raving like a lunatic because they lack the capacity to take a couple of giant steps backward and realize what’s going on. Callers aren’t focused on them though because Matt is just there most of the time and he’s the easiest and most consistent to set off.
YouTube sucks, what can I say?
There’s so much going on in the early church that most people know nothing about because Christianity doesn’t want to talk about it. There were early Christian sex cults. You don’t think there was a motive to be involved? The early church was very specific, you had to support your church leadership and, in fact, you had to give your very best to the church. They were the stewards of the faith and they deserved the best contributions that you could manage. So where these people say that they had no motives for lying about it, that’s simply wrong. Besides, I don’t think they were lying, I figure they really believed it. They were just wrong.
re: I can name a couple of other people over at the ACA that have their own very specific triggers and the second the topic comes up, they’re off, ranting and raving like a lunatic.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Do you remember how Jeff Dee💖 used to go off about people talking about hell? Hell seemed to just cause Jeff Dee to lose his mind and just explode. It seemed to me that 🔥hellfire🔥 represented something wild and unhealed in Jeff Dee because you or I would not react like that. You and I and I am sure at the intellectual level even Jeff knew it was simply made up. A bogeyman, a mythic place to control people.🔥
*re: YouTube sucks, what can I say?* I tell ya, it is to the point where you don’t know what is going to post, if it will even post, why it did not post, etc. It is bad and really wrecks the experience.
re: Christian sex cults. Sex and DRUG cults for sure! re: Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
re: Besides, I don’t think they were lying, I figure they really believed it. They were just wrong.
Oh, it sure looks like they r-e-a-l-l-y did believe it. The way they write and sound it is clear they think it is totally true. They simply did not have access to enough information. But now, folks have simply no excuse.💌
Jeff used to go off on people but I don’t remember him ever just losing his mind at the mention of hell like Matt does. Maybe it’s just been a really long time. I mean Matt just froths at the mouth the second his bugaboos come up and I’m seeing some of that in ShannonQ too. I guess people have their own problems and religion is a mind poison, but if you can’t separate your emotions from your content, maybe you ought to rethink making content on that subject for a while.
The funny thing that I’m finding is that it’s hard to find a lot of people who disagree with me on this. Tons and tons of people are agreeing that maybe Matt needs some help. I don’t want to put it that way necessarily, but you’ve got to recognize your weaknesses and stop letting people exploit them all the time.
Jeff Dee Rants On Christian Caller over Hell – A.E. #596 and Atheists Deserve Eternal Torture – Atheist Experience #461 [This caller makes a fatal mistake. He tells Jeff Dee that he is going to hell.]
I haven’t heard ShannonQ as much as Matt but, yes, people are saying Matt needs some help and it would really benefit Matt to have coaching because he would be even more effective staying calm. Christianity is totally self-deconstructing just let logic, reason and the lack of demonstrable evidence do all the work for you.
Dr. David Parker is Cadbury Professor of Theology and the Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship at the Dept. of Theology, University of Birmingham. Bart Ehrman says he is possibly the most reliable New Testament textual Greek scholar in the world, technical but pin-point accurate. He knows Christians source docs [the Bible] are just FULL of massive signs of tampering and alterations and would never pass a chain of custody test and certainly not a demonstrable evidence test. He just calmly deconstructs, deweaponizes and demythologizes —no acting out. —Strength under control and the ability to stay calm, no matter what happens. Why not stay calm (although it is hard for me too) these “faiths” have nothing demonstrable.
I don’t know that he needs help being calm, there are certainly plenty of cases where getting upset are warranted and justified, it’s just that he has these specific hot button issues where he completely loses control consistently. That’s what he needs help with. If he could have a rational conversation, that’s fine, but he can’t and he proves it every single time the issue comes up. Shannon’s issue, at least the one that I’ve noticed, is feminism. That’s where she goes off the rails and while that’s kind of a problem for Matt as well, she’s maybe a little worse. She just isn’t on enough for it to become a major issue.
If you ever read Bart Ehrman’s backstory in the forward of one of his books, I don’t remember which one at the moment, he goes through all of the things he learned in seminary and the first thing that everyone learns is that the Bible isn’t what you’ve been taught by the churches that it is. Unfortunately, for the evangelical seminaries, I doubt that’s the case. Of course, Parker isn’t a fundamentalist nutball, in fact, I haven’t been able to find a place online where he even talks about his personal beliefs. If you look at his page on the Birmingham website, he doesn’t talk about religion, period. That’s quite different than most other so-called apologists and scholars. They wear their religion on their sleeves first and foremost and their scholarship comes a distant second.
Absolutely, Parker keeps a v-e-r-y low profile and as you say, so many serious professors do not want the exposure someone like Ehrman has. That’s a shame. ―But if you look in “The Living Text of the Gospels” (Dr. David Parker) ―you can probably download it from the web for free, he goes through all the textual variants/ interpolations/ redactions/ textual alterations/ additions, et. al. This is game over for anyone thinking you can trust the text of the New Testament.
Yes, Ehrman even says in debates that you learn in seminary that the Bible isn’t what you’ve been taught by the churches that it is.
In fact, that is one of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity: seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous, and that in fact we don’t have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they put it back on the shelf. Got to make money and spread false hope! Pastors are, as a rule, very reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.
I’ve never really seen Shannon enough to know but with Matt’s specific hot button issues where he completely loses control consistently, yeah, it may be something wild and unhealed from his past. Overreactions so often are.
Christianity often really, r-e-a-l-l-y messes people up because they thought it was fact not fiction. Also, as you all too well know, Christians being dishonest is really maddening.
They “forget” because that isn’t their job. Pastors get out of seminary and go on to make money for their churches and gather a flock around their own personal cult of personality. It is counter to their interests to worry about what the Bible really says. Theologians tend to go off and work for religious universities that force signed statements of faith on them and if they say anything contrary to their pledge, they lose their jobs. Apologists, they have a profit motive in mind. They don’t care if any of it is true, they’ve got books to sell and speaking engagements to collect from. None of it matters. “Fact” isn’t their primary concern, in fact, the facts often get in the way of their established goals. The last thing they want to talk about is the reality of the Bible. They’d all be out of a job.
As for Matt, while I don’t pretend to know what’s going on in his head, I don’t know that Christianity has anything at all to do with his over-reaction. I think it’s something a little more political.
Oh yeah, it sure looks like apologists don’t care if it’s true, they just care if it’s useful to them making a cash flow stream.
I never thought about Matt’s political angle but maybe that certainly is true.
Matt’s pushing his political views onto his viewers like the preacher in the church?
-Sometimes I even think: Why does Matt even have a co-host?
Matt’s skepticism has become contingent on his politics?
The demands of Matt’s core audience are that he dumbs down his skepticism for group identity?
To his credit, he will, sometimes, just stop answering and let his co-host get some time, but let’s be honest, when he’s on, people are only calling to talk to him and that’s not exactly his fault. I suspect he’s doing the best that he can.
I honestly don’t know why he does it, I can only speculate but it’s been something that I’ve noticed for a very long time that political ideology has a lot to do with the shows that the ACA produces. I don’t know that it’s mandated by the ACA, although you certainly get some things, like how they handled the whole Rationality Rules thing, which cost them a huge portion of their co-hosts who left in protest, but I’ve seen the same kind of thing across the spectrum of YouTube atheist channels, where ideology gets in the way of intelligent, rational positions. When your fee-fees intrude, you’ve got problems.
Yeah, that whole Stephen Woodford debacle cost them good hosts like Tracie Harris and good support folks (John Iacoletti, Phil Session, etc.) What a total mess!
re: where ideology gets in the way of intelligent, rational positions. When your fee-fees intrude, you’ve got problems.
Absolutely, I think politics, religion and ideology can all be the same thing if you are not very careful.
To me, an ideologue is one who places agendas above truth. We need more science creating facts, less ideologies. Ideologies exist only where there is no facts/knowledge. If you know something, you do not have to believe or disbelieve it. Faith-based ideologies enslave all those who believe in them (-I know you know that). Religions, to a large extent, as you well know, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religions. The “nonbelievers” or “wrong believers” who not infrequently saw themselves justified in the killing others.
It just didn’t change their minds. They didn’t learn a thing from it, nor, I suspect, do they care. I stopped watching things like the Non-Prophets years back because it was all ideology and no substance and now, I pick and choose which videos I watch from the main shows, ignoring all of the ones that I know are going to turn into a giant disaster, unless I’m in the mood to poke fun at it. They’re also allowing far too many troll callers through. The second it becomes painfully obvious that the caller isn’t interested in a useful conversation, they ought to be banned from the show. They just don’t do that though, which means I don’t think the ACA much cares about intelligent calls.
This is really why my tagline has always been “exposing stupidity wherever it hides”. It isn’t all about religion, although that’s the clearest offender, it’s anyone who cares more about their feelings than they do about the facts and that’s not just limited to religion. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you know that your position is factually incorrect and believe it anyhow, but far too many people are ideologically deadlocked, they can’t step back and evaluate their ideas in light of the evidence because they just don’t care about the evidence, they care only if they get emotional comfort from holding the position. I can’t tell you how many times I get banned and censored for pointing out the bald hypocrisy out there, where they will just conveniently “forget” all of the bad things their side did once it becomes inconvenient. The whole world is sad these days. We’re not getting any better.
re: The second it becomes painfully obvious that the caller isn’t interested in a useful conversation, they ought to be banned from the show. They just don’t do that though, which means I don’t think the ACA much cares about intelligent calls.✔
It’s hard to get intelligent callers. The fresh ideas would come from the frontiers of science and those people are probably not calling in. Also, I think if solid facts and arguments were put forward, we would all know about it very quickly.
re: “exposing stupidity wherever it hides”. ✔
Yeah, that’s a great tagline and yes it isn’t (at all) all about religion.
I guess I never thought about it as deeply as when I started listening to your videos but then it became so clear to me that it was, in fact, more about feelings than about the facts.
I guess I never saw that so clearly as I have lately. The tag-line for the Seminary I went to was “Teaching Timeless Truths.” I stupidly thought we were trying to find the truth. How little did I know or even realize.
Only you relentlessly pounding away on the feels got me to think about the fact that religion is a blend of terror management and feelings. Most of us do our best to not think about death. But there’s always a part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us.
The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons. And, while rarely explicit, what they’re really worried about (I think) is death and terror management. When we’re arguing about teaching evolution in the schools, I would argue that we’re really arguing about death. It seems to me the only reason why any religious person cares about evolution is because –if the Bible is wrong about our origins, the Bible is very likely wrong about our destiny after death. So, when you say to someone that “you’re a fool for not believing in evolution,” or “a fool that you think the universe is 6,000 years old,” I think that gets translated as: ”You’re a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident at 16 is really in Heaven, with Jesus.” And that, is a very different communication.
The question is: how can people, close to this tragedies make sense of them? Religions provide an answer for that. It’s an unjustified answer, it’s a very bad answer, it’s an answer that comes with a host of other liabilities, one being that it has birth many competing and irreconcilable answers, and therefore religious conflict and political tribalism seem impossible to overcome.
But religion does provide an answer that most people think they need.
If your child dies in a car accident, believing that she is now in Heaven with Jesus has to be consoling. It has to be consoling in a way that no other belief can be. It’s true that there’s a shadow side to this kind of thinking. I’ve heard from people who’ve suffered tragedies like this in the context of their faith and found that the belief in an afterlife was actually a way for their friends not to connect with their grief. And, in fact, to grieve too much in such a circumstance is a sign that you lack faith. What are you really grieving about, if you really think that the one you love most in this world is now in a better place, and you’re gonna be rejoined with her in a twinkle of an eye?
I think that we can admit that atheism doesn’t offer real consolation on this point. And that’s not an accident. Reality is one rough road. If you’re open to new evidence, there’s no guarantee that the revisions in our world view are going to be consoling.
When you lose Santa Clause, what you get in his place is not as fun. When we think about what is lost when we leave a religion, it’s not the holidays, and the architecture, and the music, and the humility, and the awe, and the profundity…, all of that can be had very much within the purview of reason. And it can be had without lying to ourselves, or to our children, or to other people or their children, about the nature of reality. The thing that gets lost, the thing for which there is no real substitute is total consolation in the face of death. And it seems to me that, if we want to build the bridge to a rational world, that the better part of humanity can cross, we need to deal with that fact.💌