(04-10-2020, 10:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: [ -> ]The strange thing is that I have always thought I might be able to change peoples beliefs with a logical discussion or pointing toward obvious reality. It was not a workable idea. People don't change their beliefs because of what I say very often. It has happened, I think, but you can't make a person drink the water after leading them to it.
The logical thing to do is often the tough thing to do. For someone with obsolete skills, the solution is often to take a job that pays badly that one thoroughly hates. Or it is to relocate or retrain, the former grossly unsettling and the last coming with no guarantees. The current (and probably dying) paradigm holds that elite profit, indulgence, and gain (note the first three letters... P I G!) are the rightful objective of people who get little from it. For an alcoholic or addict it might be giving up the troublesome chemical and the culture (the bar) that goes with it. One of course needs something else, and must find it, lest one relapse. So it is with any compulsive behavior, whether shopping, gambling, political extremism, or cult membership.
Applying cold logic to a crossword, sudoku, or number-place problem is far easier than applying it to a messed-up personal life or to finding that what one believes will never make one happy. For many, cold logic may cause one to recognize that one is a failure beyond help. Cold logic cannot prevent despair. Cold logic could never bring me transcendence should I be dying of pancreatic cancer. Maybe we can delve into fantasy in someone else's creative activity in art, literature, or music or a short-lived festival... but few of us can live in such a fantasy world. One may need such to put up with jobs that we hate in communities that we find grossly inadequate.
There has never been, and never will be, any social order that can fully lift most people from having to do jobs that they loathe that consign them to poverty. Abrupt revolutions typically exchange one set of masters (in Russia, an aristocratic elite) for a new one -- Bolshevik administrators who in a rather short time take on the characteristic attitudes of the despised aristocracy much like the pigs and their brutal enforcers (dogs) of Orwell's
Animal Farm. The capitalist order keeps offering opiates of the masses, whether religion or pop culture, as sops to the saps.
Quote:Bill says he's an agnostic who believes in evolution and the big bang, and Coca Puff says he believes God created the world in 6 days and that Jesus is his savior. I don't agree with either side, at least not entirely, but how can I change these beliefs they hold?
I'm the sort to ask "what do you mean by 'God'"? and recognize that the narrower the definition one has, typically for the purpose of endorsing a certain world-view, the weaker one's position is. If God exists, then He (or she, or it -- whatever) let evolution happen, but little is inevitable. Had that cosmic body not struck the Earth about 65 million years ago, then the most effective predators on Earth would be giant dinosaurs that would have left no niche for mammals larger than house cats and Jack Russell terriers. Heck, I saw "Sue", the T-Rex at the Chicago Museum of Natural History, next to a simulacrum of an African elephant... and the African elephant would have had no chance to avoid becoming T-Rex prey. Instead I had pieces of a descendant of dinosaurs, a chicken, for lunch today.
If someone gives me a "believe-it-or-burn" argument for young-earth creationism, then I counter with questions on how a benign god could create a universe that looks to have come into existence in so different a manner just to deceive rationalists to damn them to Hell with murderers, rapists, and thieves. I would no more worship a malevolent divinity than I would worship a mobster. A benign God does not forge a fossil record that seduces me into believing that young-earth creationism is a ludicrous fraud. If there is a benign God, then He in the end separates Holocaust victims and gives them eternal bliss while Holocaust perpetrators are either obliterated or are condemned to endure great suffering. Heck, I am tempted the puritan view that the righteous get a ringside seat watching the sufferings of the damned is the opposite of what I would do if I were God; I would turn the video cameras, telescopes, or whatever means are in use to transmit images from one place to the other show the delights of Paradise to the damned as taunts of what is denied them. Bad dogs ripping Irma Grese to pieces (she turned her dogs against live prisoners to kill them... I can hardly imagine a worse way to go than to be preyed upon by dogs, as bears, Big cats, and crocodilians make short work of us) would get very old very fast. God, if real, merits worship only if good.
Quote:Classic Xer believes that democrats create dependency and are leaches. Trickle-down economics, as I call that general ideology. Reagan's imaginary welfare queen. It has lots of believers. Why do I think I can change his mind by arguing with him? I know I can't. It's just a mental exercise, and at the very most informative for others who might read it. Even that is unlikely.
The achievement of anything worthy, whether milking a cow or composing Don Giovanni, requires work. To be sure, I am satisfied that opera singers performing even a tragic opera are in bliss as if playing, and that doing oil changes is drudgery... maybe some necessary work is drudgery to practically anyone who does it.
Classic X'er demonstrates very rigid thought. It is practically impossible to break rigid thought. Classic X'er seems to have little reason to change unless in his psyche he finds something lacking in his life. I find music. Example: although J S Bach wrote some of the most complex music ever with strange chords not in use in the twentieth century until the 1950's, he also wrote some structurally-simple works such as his clavier partitas and his suites for violoncello that invite lavish, highly-individual interpretation. Rigid performance of such is pointless.
Quote:It works the other way more often. I make mistakes in my thoughts and ideas, sometimes, and I learn things from others, sometimes, because there's a lot I don't know, especially on the more factual level.
Wise and brilliant people make mistakes, but learn from them; the greatest geniuses break the rules only to show that the means in which they break the rules may have seemed foolish before the fact is obvious after the fact. Unimaginative mediocrities simply do what they are told and get adequate results. Stupidity is not knowing what the rules are; madness is believing that fecal results that one gets from breaking the rules without contemplating the product is genius.
If you conservees want to stick with climate change denial until the day you die, by all means be my guest. But it's why you guys are anathema to us blues.