Skepticism

Waking Up From Being ‘Woke’

/ Jim / 5 Comments

 

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I don’t know how many have been paying attention, but david Silverman is trying to make a comeback of sorts – attempting to resuscitate his career in atheism, I guess. I don’;t know exactly why, because during the worst times of the schism, he was relatively silent. In fact, if anything he supported the tactics of what is now referred to those considered woke. I first noticed when he did this long, extremely cringeworthy interview recently with Atheist Republic. I could only get to the one-hour point, although I did go back and attempt to watch more. I believe everyone should have a chance, a voice, especially when they’re trying to resore a reputation that may have been damaged by false accusations.

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Belief Does Not Equate to Truth

/ Jim / 1 Comment

 

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One thing I try to keep in mind when I’m on social media, are the numbers of people that will switch on their outrage engine at the slightest provocation. I usually try not to cause any controversy but sometimes, that is impossible to accomplish based on the content of my timeline on Twitter sometimes. I am often astonished at the numbers of people that are willing to believe absolutely anything, as long as it sits neatly within their political or social justice basket. Some will make the most outrageous statements, that appear to be fact based, but never offer anything that comes close to proving their statement. I see these tweets retweeted sometimes in the thousands.

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Having a Conversation With Your Opponents

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We’ve lost the ability to have a meaningful dialogue amongst ourselves, notably those of us that have different views politically as well as socially. We are so divided that we refuse to entertain any idea that might fall outside our belief system. It hasn’t always been that way. There was actually a time, not that distant, where well intentioned people could have a conversation on any topic, even when they disagreed and that discussion wouldn’t devolve into name calling and screaming at one another. Just because someone disagrees doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. Different people can look at the same information and come to different conclusions about that information. We’ve become tribal, and those that are not in our tribe are our enemies.

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It’s Just a Joke (Or is it?)

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People will get bent out of shape over the slightest appearance of offense. There’s nothing new in human nature about it, it’s just that with the advent of the Internet, and more recently, social media, it has become easier to find crowds of the offended and often a simple statement may go viral and the person that made the statement, or produced the video, will somehow become the focus of a derangement unheard of until the last dozen or so years. Sometimes, these innocuous utterances will even make national level news. Again, 20 years ago, no one would have ever heard, but because every journalist (or wanna be) is on social media, these are easily picked up and spread widely, over a short period of time.

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Shouting At The Wall

/ Jim / 1 Comment

 

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Sometime ago,  I wrote about my spending too. much time on social media, specifically Twitter. I decided that I was not going to do that anymore, and for a little while, that worked. I would log in to see if there was anything there worthy of responding to, but that was about it. For a while. I then found several people that I follow that were much more interesting to pursue dialogue with and of course that killed my experiment.  Hypocrite.  Well, here I am again, doing the same thing, limiting my time online simply because it is an addiction of sorts, even when I become involved with interesting people. I’ve really discovered that I actually don’t have much to say, and what I do have to say probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me.

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