Murdered Charlie Hebdo Editor: 'I Prefer to Die Standing Up Than Live on My Knees'
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Labels: Liars for Jesus
Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.From the book You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself, by David McRaney. I've added this book to the list of others describing the same phenomena. LINK.
“I can be quite foolish at times.”
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Facing Reality is Hard |
Labels: Philosophy of Religion
The "Founding Fathers" were not creating an America where Christmas could not be publicly celebrated! Well, except for the earliest ones, who were doing precisely that. The very ones who came to the new continent for the sake of religious freedom. And not just that, but celebrating Christmas, in those days, was a sure sign that you were against them!The Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland has cut Christmas and Easter, as well as Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, from next year's school calendar. No religious holiday will be mentioned by name. NPR reported on the origin of the decision: "The path to the board's decision started about two years ago on something that was somewhat unrelated. Members of the county's Muslim community -- roughly estimated at around 10 percent of the more than 1 million population -- were seeking to have two of their religion's holy days added to the calendar of days off. They wanted Eid al-Adha the most." Instead of adopting new religious days for Muslims, however, the board approved the removal of all Christian and Jewish religious holiday references by a 7-1 vote. The students will continue to get the same religious days off, but there will be generic references to them, such as "winter break." Board members have even gone so far as to reinterpret the historical recognition of the holidays by saying that the days off are not meant to observe those religious holidays. The board's president, Phil Kauffman, explained, "The best way to accommodate the diversity of our community is to not make choices about which communities we're going to respect in our calendar and which ones we're not going to respect." But does religious neutering accommodate diversity or merely endorse secular progressivism and political correctness as America's new religion? Choices are the very actions our Bill of Rights was created to protect. In the end, however, rather than affirm Americans' freedom of religion, society has spawned their freedom from religion. NPR reported that nearly all of the 16 districts across the country that are larger than Montgomery County Public Schools have already discarded any mention of religious holidays on their calendars.That's not the America our Founding Fathers created for us.