Preposterous wishful thinking.

I noticed a link to a blog in a Google ad earlier while reading my e-mail and decided to have a look. What I found both saddened and angered me while simultaneously causing me to laugh out loud at its claims.

Answer The Skeptic

I felt compelled to write a lengthy comment denouncing what I read, which led me to notice something else; almost every overtly religious blog I've run across moderates their comments and tends to only allow comments that they agree with. This shouldn't really be a surprise, considering that it is precisely the mentality of such religious people; to only acknowledge points of view and information which seem to support their belief while willfully avoiding at all costs acknowledging any information or facts to the contrary. Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance at their most pronounced.

With that said, I'm including my comment below as I'm not sure it will show up on the other site. Here is the original post that prompted my initial response (which grew to encompass other points on that site etc.): Humans are different from other animals

I think the important thing to note here is the obvious statement that "I don't care if the evidence proves that we are related to monkeys and just another animal, I don't want to believe it because I don't like it, so I'm going to argue that my feelings are more important than factual reality."

Science proves that we are related to the great apes etc, and are just another animal in the animal kingdom, evolved in the same way as the rest. Religion on the other hand is still trying to cling to the ancient mythology that we are some magical, divine being created wholly separately from the rest of the animal kingdom.

They only grudgingly, and wholly hypocritically, admit pieces and parts of the truth while still trying to hopelessly cling to the ancient myths.

My frustration with this behavior is such things as teaching Evolution still being outlawed in more socially behind the times areas such as the southern states etc... Creationist mythology being dressed up to pretend that it's not just religious wishful thinking and pawned off on our children under the false pretense of it being scientific... a claim which has been soundly disproven in courts of law.

This kind of primitive and dishonest thinking is slowly turning our country into an intellectual backwater where scientific research and education is taking a backseat to primitive mythology and superstition. Modern technological and medical advancements are now being made overseas and the United States is losing its place at the forefront of human scientific progress. Our children are left a mockery to more educated industrialized countries, left unable to fully comprehend global scientific, political, social and cultural issues... being blinded by the cognitive dissonance and fog of internally conflicting facts and myths, reality in front of their eyes and heads full of ancient fairytale stories about the world they perceive. When these things inevitably conflict, they are left in a sort of cognitive daze.

It's not hard to look and see what this religious wishful thinking and desperate denial of reality is doing to our country.

As final food for thought in response to some of the desperate and off-base claims made by the article referred to in the post... consider that dolphins have been shown to understand time, the concept of future rewards in relation to investment etc... and other animals such as elephants and gorillas have been shown to understand the concept of mortality. The dolphins were trained to pick up litter in the pool and return it to the trainers for a reward. The dolphins on their own came up with the idea of hiding a piece of litter at the bottom of the pool and tearing off pieces of it to get more fish at later times. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jul/03/research.science

Here is another good article that covers this general theme: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/23/10551/6579

In short, your wishful thinking, despite the reality around you, is a problem. If you simply started accepting the facts of reality around you, you could open your eyes to the vast and mind boggling wonders of the universe that REALLY EXISTS around you. This is vastly more wondrous and awe inspiring than the small minded myths invented by ignorant and primitive sheep herders thousands and thousands of years ago when people still thought the earth was flat, the sky was a mechanical dome, the sun was a light that orbited the earth, that the world was only a few thousand years old, that knew nothing of other continents, dinosaurs, atomic structures, physics, sickness and health, flight and on and on and on.

Putting that mythology behind us and pursuing real knowledge of the world around us has enabled mankind to fly, to leave the bonds of mother earth and step foot upon other worlds, gazing back at our planet through the vastness of space... to understand the world we cannot see in provable ways which enable us to harness atomic energy, to create the very computer you're reading and typing on at this very moment, that allowed us to send out probes which have flown far beyond the reaches of our solar system into the vast expanse of interstellar space...

Clinging to primitive myths despite facts and evidence proving otherwise is blasphemous to the very nature of the human mind. Reprehensible to human progress. Such religiously based willful ignorance and defiance of reality would have all of us still living in mud huts, fearful of a vengeful sky god who would smote us with spears from heaven if we were bad, or strike us down with plagues for our sins... sicknesses which we would be ignorantly praying for salvation from rather than harnessing our scientific knowledge to cure them ourselves.

Religion is the ceaseless denial of the greatest accomplishments of mankind, of mankind's greatest potential. It would have us all remain servile and ignorant sheep and that, to me, is an abomination.

Reading some of the other articles on this blog saddens, frustrates and even angers me with the insult it does to humanity and our own common sense at the very least. Arguing about evil when the bible itself states that God CREATED evil... a vengeful, jealous god that creates good and evil, creates sin, lives in darkness, lies to his creations, creates a flawed angel whom he allows to rebel and take one third of all the angels with him to earth to further torment his less loved creations, angels being held closer to him in both favor and locale, allowing humanity to sin and then punishing them for it when he created that sin to begin with... refusing to forgive the sin or simply remove the sin, but preferring to subject humanity to an eternity of suffering for what HE CREATED... then creating a son to be sent to earth to suffer and die horribly for nothing more than a show... STILL not removing that punishment for sin... leaving humanity no better off than the moments after Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... the list goes on and on... and what's worse is that it's ALL A STORY! A provably ridiculous myth written by primitive people thousands of years ago! And you people still cling to it as FACTUAL REALITY!?

Articles about science not being able to YET fully explain the origin of the universe, or FULLY understand the physical functioning of the human brain... SERIOUSLY!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? Science has taken mankind from believing the ignorance of the bible to being able to travel between planets! To fly through space! Science has allowed us to map the functions of the brain, enabling advanced brain surgery and greater understanding of mental impairments and diseases etc...

Your desperate claims to point to Science not FULLY explaining some of the most profoundly complex problems of our time when you have NO PROOF WHATSOEVER for your beliefs, and not to mention that they are even more ridiculous in light of the MOUNTAINS of scientific PROOF to the contrary... you have the audacity to point to modern astrophysics and call it a fundamental failure that they haven't PROVEN the creation of the universe when the best your ignorant shepherds millennia ago have come up with is that a man in the sky created everything one day!? LISTEN TO YOURSELF!

If the Universe requires a creator because of its complexity, then how can the creator, being necessarily more complex than the universe, not also require a creator? And if the creator does not require a creator, then the universe, being less complex, would certainly not either and would be more likely to have simply sprung into existence.

The logic behind that simple statement is enough to explain the foolishness of your beliefs to even a child. And fortunately we have mountains and mountains of scientific evidence and proof from centuries of research and understanding and human achievement to bring us, through a preponderance of convergent evidence, to the enlightened understandings we have today of the REAL WORLD AROUND US, an understanding that compels us to leave the ignorant and primitive myths of our ancient ancestors where they belong... by the wayside along with all the other gods and myths man has worshipped, believed and inevitably left behind on the road of human progress.