Do you think throwing insults works as a way of changing minds?

You throw a lot of insults my way. And the only difference I see between us is that I seek to change minds by fostering faith in humanity. While I suspect (based on your way of responding to me) that you seek to change minds by fostering lack of faith in god.

It’s the difference between helping a child learn a better way of doing a job, and telling a child they’re stupid for doing it the way they are.

Perhaps you don’t have any faith in humanity either?

It’s a common affliction among youth. They learn that the ‘truths’ they’ve been taught as children aren’t true after all, lose faith in those who taught those ‘truths,’ and, projecting, lose faith in society at large.

Is that you?

Youth is also subject to extreme defensiveness.

Is that you?

Let me point out that confronting believers with evidence and logic does not necessarily entail instilling anger, guilt, frustration or fear, as you imply.

And, you missed my point entirely. Perhaps I didn’t state it as clearly as I should. Because it’s not about morality, per se. It’s about fear.

Fear is what keeps people clinging to god.

I suspect it is fear that keeps you clinging to your fixation on believers. Fear of what?

Fear that your own lack of faith in humanity is justified. That’s my take.

I hold out for evidence that I’m wrong about that. But throwing insults my way won’t change that suspicion (they will work, however, to confirm it). As I see it, you treat me as a stand-in for much of what you see wrong in society. Your anger towards me, your belittling of me, the insults, the assumptions you make about my beliefs, they all add up to a great frustration with humanity.

Things are afoot, Avi. Categorical change has arrived. It’s been growing exponentially for a while (the slow part of the curve). If you don’t belief it now, you will when you’re my age, looking back at how much has changed, and how quickly.

Setbacks are inevitable. Change is always fraught. And when we’re talking billions of humans even categorical change takes time. It will take many years, hundreds even, before any human can gain enough perspective to look back and speak with authority on ‘what happened.’

Where are we going? I don’t know. I have my suspicions. Ultimately it will involve a change in perspective on who we are as humans. But however it goes my faith is that it’s a much better place we’re going to than where we now (or have been at any sustained point in the past).

But, when they do write that record, those who read it will look back, and wonder what it was like to have lived that change, to have been there, and be part of that change.

You and I are living it.

Be good (humanity is worth the effort ‘being good’ takes).