So let’s talk about it.
So, in effect, someone called in and said some things about gay people or trans people, it wasn’t anything intended to be insulting but both Matt and Shannon Q, especially Shannon, just blew up about it. screaming, and she was literally screaming at the caller, about things he never even said. I’m sorry but if you can’t control your emotions, you don’t belong on the show, period.
Then, a couple of hours later, I saw a response video to something that someone had said about the ACA and while I didn’t really agree with a lot of what was said, especially the guy who was talking over the response, it eventually pushed me to write this.
Keep in mind that everything I’m about to say applies only to me and my positions, so take it as you will. Personally, I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as I can. Attribute that saying to Matt Dillahunty. However, I also want to keep my evaluation of true and false things strictly to the evidence involved. My feelings don’t mean a damn thing and no one else’s do either. So when it comes to religion, all of the “show me where the priest touched you on this doll” crap is meaningless. I don’t reject religion because I’m mad at God or because I had bad experiences in the church, I do so solely because of the utter lack of evidence for the claims that the religious make. My feelings have absolutely nothing to do with my position.
I try to maintain that philosophy throughout all of the positions that I take in life. It’s not easy sometimes, but if I can at least recognize where I have an emotional attachment to an idea, I can work to separate that feeling from my rational evaluation of the content. At the very least, I can manually push my feelings out of the way so I can look at the idea dispassionately. That’s the most fair and most coherent way, at least in my opinion, that a rational person can operate.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of atheists out there and that includes the ACA and a lot of online atheist groups and YouTubers, who seem completely oblivious to their emotional state. They believe a thing because of how it makes them feel and they never stop to consider whether they should re-evaluate their position based on the evidence, mostly because they’ve never evaluated their position rationally to begin with.
This is a problem and in the Atheist Experience example above, that’s exactly what’s going on. Both Matt and Shannon have such a strong emotional attachment to their political and social views that they lose all grasp on their sensibilities when the topic comes up.
It was obvious right up front when Matt leapt to a complete straw man when he started to defend feelings about gender and gender expression. The caller kept saying “that’s not what I’m saying!” but by then, it was too late. Both Matt and Shannon were off ranting about nonsense and wasting everyone’s time. For a show that supposedly prides itself in caring about the time of the audience, it doesn’t apply when the hosts go off the rails.
Because here’s the reality, even though it’s not really on topic for this post. Gender dysphoria, which is what Javier tried to bring up, is an actual, demonstrable, medical condition. It’s in your genes and it has absolutely nothing at all to do with how you feel about your gender. Your feelings don’t matter to anyone but you. Just because you decide out of the blue one day that you’re male or female or a flamingo for that matter, it doesn’t change the actual reality unless your genetics backs it up.
This is something that a lot of people on the far left really like to push because, say it with me, it caters to their fee-fees. Honestly, that’s all these people are trying to do, appeal to people’s emotions. You know who else does that? The religious! All they are doing is trying to appeal to the emotional state of their congregants so they can make money or stroke their own egos and the political are no different whatsoever. The fundamental problem for all of these emotionally-derived positions is, in fact, the over-reliance on emotion over intellect and the ACA has a terminal case of it. Lots of online atheists do. It’s really sad that they can’t see that they’re being every bit as “religious” as the religious are, isn’t it?