I went on an unintended trip down the proverbial rabbit hole today when a video showed up in my feed on “where woke people go wrong” or something like that. It dove into all the places that the political left take leave of their senses, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but at the very end,  it said something about “the real place we get knowledge and morals is God!”

Yeah, you’re doing exactly what the people you criticizes are doing. What the hell else is new?

 

This is nothing new, of course. I’ve been talking about it forever, but the world becomes clearer the more I look at one side criticizing the other and then pulling the exact same stuff that it finds fault in with others. It doesn’t matter which side you listen to, and trust me, I’ve heard both sides, they all do the same thing. Hard-left atheists criticizing the religious and hard-right political pundits criticizing the left. Both are just as guilty as the ones they point fingers at, but they are completely blinded by their fanaticism.

I was not remotely surprised and neither should anyone else be.

After the first video, I just followed the primrose path that YouTube laid out for me and over a couple of hours, I had consumed 8-10 different videos, from both sides, and in every single case, they proved themselves to be hypocrites. In one, they insisted that postmodernism and left-wing talking points were all socially derived, which is absolutely true, then they pretended that God or religion or whatever they believed fervently, gave them the proper way to live their lives, while simply appealing to religiously derived claims that cannot be justified as true.

Both sides are running on pure fee-fees and faith and neither can see the problems on their own side.

This is something I’ve been talking about for a very long time and pointing out specific instances when it happens, and sadly, it happens a lot. I don’t post about it nearly as often as I should because I don’t think it’s going to do any good. People on all sides are idiots. That’s nothing to be proud of.

This was brought to a head when, on Reddit, someone posted in an atheist subreddit about the difference between belief and knowledge. My answer was clear and immediate. Belief is what you think is true or want to be true. Knowledge is what you can back up with objective evidence and show that it actually is true. The OP and I had a nice enough discussion for a while, but I am firmly convinced that the definition I provided is valid and defensible. Knowledge is, after all, justified true belief. You can’t know something is true unless you have independent evidence to back it up. Really, really believing it for emotional reasons means nothing. It doesn’t make it true, it just means it’s what you wish could be and that ought to mean nothing to anyone.

I care only what  you can support and defend objectively, using something that all parties in the discussion can independently examine for themselves without having to come to an emotional conclusion about it first. That’s what truth is. That which remains after everyone else goes away. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference how you feel, only if it’s real and far too many people, maybe even a majority, don’t care about that at all.

Maybe that’s why I don’t  want to talk to most people. Trust me, if there was a decent place to go, I’d never use Reddit again. It’s a cesspool. I have no interest in X or any other instant-messenger-type place. That requires you to sit there and stare at it and I don’t want to do that. I have no time for that. I want a place that’s a message forum where you can browse the threads whenever you get a chance and every forum out there is crap, filled with idiots who can’t speak coherently on anything. The only thing Reddit has going for it is that it’s busy and I can hopefully pick out one or two things that don’t make my brains dribble out my ears. I’ve looked for a place for intelligent people forever.

Sad that it doesn’t seem to exist, isn’t it?