Grown-ups wasting perfectly good brains
For the past 10 months, or 59 years depending on how you count, I’ve been angered or annoyed by the built-in denials that 99.999% of all grown-up people seem to have.
I’m not talking solely about religion — but that part is important, and why I mentioned “59 years.”
When I was 8 years old, in 1961, my mother was taking me to sunday school one Sunday morning. It was the second time. When we were near the church, I said, “Mom. Please stop and let me out.” So she stopped. And asked me what was wrong. I told her I couldn’t and wouldn’t ever go to sunday school again. She cried, but let me out and never tried to get me to go again.
I tell this story for a reason. It makes it clear that I was willing to make decisions about my own life and beliefs, and to keep those beliefs if I still found them valid at later dates. My nearly venomous feelings about religion were one of those beliefs. Only in later years did I learn that the opposition of scientists and religious people has existed for at least 10,000 years.
Speaking of venomous, right now I’m writing some pretty harsh comments and articles, mostly on Medium. Maybe I would have been doing this anyway, but with the universe itself (at least the universe that includes living humans) at a critical tipping point, I’m trying to make a Hail Mary, if you’ll pardon the religious pun. I mean, if there might possibly be a couple thousand people out of the the almost 8 billion infesting this planet who can actually think clearly and see what’s happening without lapsing into denial (or prayer), then maybe we could make a coalition and accomplish the necessary.
That may sound simple, I don’t know. I do know that I can name about seven people so far who can think that clearly. That’s out of unimaginable thousands who cannot. I guess if I could add in dead people, it’d be fine. Plato, 100 other Greeks, Darwin, Thorstein Veblen . . . but in the 21st century? Seven +/- people, which sucks. And explains why we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
