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Ignorance at its finest...
Now while your reading this post try to keep in mind that I love my family, despite how stupid and narrow minded they can be.
When it comes to being an athiest, I definitely take it to the extreme. I don't believe in anything even remotely paranormal. I think the idea of ghosts, angels, magic, all that stuff is just a way to make our ordinary lives more interesting. But on top of this I also don't believe in conspiracies...at least the ones that are still based on speculation.
So needless to say I definitely don't believe the moon landing was fake, and I SUPER don't believe the whole 9/11 bull. But my aunt and grama do...which actually bugged me alot when I first found out. Not only do they believe the moon landing was fake and 9/11 was organized by the president, but they believe in astrology! My freaken grama thinks she can tell what kind of person you are by looking at yur handwriting because she's a self proclaimed wicken...and somehow this gives her the ability.
So once all this was out in the open they decided that they needed to prove their beliefs to me. My aunt told me that the full moon affects people. Like there's more babies born and more murders. I asked her what proof she had and she typed it into google and brought up the first article she saw and assumed that would be proof enough for me. So I told her I wasn't some idiot who was gonna read some random article by a random guy I didn't know with no credentials and no citations.
After that everything kept going down hill. I think we've argued about one of these topics at least once a week since we discovered our huge differences. I try not to bring it up, but I think the reason it bugs me so much is because I used to respect her a whole lot more than I do now.
My grama's no better too. My ex studies physics and i think my family bothers him more than me. Once when they got into the moon landing debate my grama flat out told him half way through that she simply didn't believe him. In other words: she simply didn't want to believe him.
Not only this, but they've actually told me that they feel sorry for me. When I asked them why my aunt said that not believing in things and having such a difficult mind to convince was sad. Like just because I can't read some random article and believe her makes my life dull. And when I tried to tell her that I was much happier not complicating my outlook on life with theories and just concentration on what actually exists; she just shook her head. Clearly she doesn't want to think someone can have a good life and think the way I do.
I'm baffled that this went unnoticed for so long. I used to think i was alot like my aunt, she was someone I looked up to and thought was pretty smart. Now I just think she's a lazy dumbass...I dunno what to thinkk about all this.
Any comments?
P.S: I'm sorry about my horrible grammar and punctuation, I'm terrible with both...
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Prog Rock Girl on -
Most of the people I know who claim to have nifty magic powers are also kinda strapped for cash, too. (Why don't they just make money levitate toward them? Hah!)
I've known some atheist artists and other creative people, they are probably a minority but there are some. (It's gotta be the same with poets.) Creativity is the good part of being right-brained. Woo, not so much. In the bi and polyamorous subcultures, sometimes pretty much everyone else is Wiccan except me...luckily I met some atheists, too.
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Permalink Reply by New Atheist on -
Prog Rock Girl, I know! That is so annoying! Most of the people I know who consider themselves to be so intellectual and so open minded about things tend to be pagans and Wiccans.
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Permalink Reply by TNT666 on -
There is a little teeny smidgeon or reasonable thinking behind that. It's been written by several feminists that the loss of female power and autonomy due to sedentarisation of humanity and the establishement of male religions imposing concepts of monogamy created a great loss of knowledge in these societies for women. I've read somewhere in these forums someone say that N.American First Nations were small short lived people. Well not all, the Migmah for example at the time of first contact were written up to be tall and strong by Cabot and Cartier diarists. These pre-religious civilisations in N.America had a pretty good life expectancy too. And they were not dying of these plagues such as overpopulated Europe was. They did die en-masse upon arribal of whites because of germ warfare. N.American human genotypes (and Pacific Islanders) had NO previous experience with European microbial/viral genotypes and their immune systems were completely overrun with these new diseases. So what healing knowledge they had proved to be completely useless in the face of European germ warfare. There were great populations all along the Amazon, millions of people, NOT all sick and dying at 30! (as I've read a proud atheist state).
I think a fraction of our society is romantic about these times, with due cause. But to try and experience that in our modern society or claim to have that kinda of traditional knowledge is indeed usually woo. But at least it's not pure snake oil as the middle ages gave us. Knowledged ones back then were'nt guessing at things and listening to ghosts. They transmitted knowledge in very different ways, through ritual, song, stories passed on from generation to generation within certain familial lineages and each society had very small areas of expertise. No single society had both "mountain" life skills/knowledge and "ocean" life skills/knowledge, or cold versus hot.
To proclaim to all the knowledge did not exist before modern science is ... pompousness. Knowledge gets lost through population loss cataclysms such as massive climate change and warfare. In Eurasia, think of all the remnants of great irrigation and aqueduct systems that have been lost for nearly 2000 years. Feats of engineering, long before we Northern Europeans RE-learned them.
Patriarchal societies have shifted the burden of the telling of history to the victors of great warfare, this has caused the loss of history on the side of the conquored.
Today I watch saddly as the last remnants of native knowledge in N.America is purified away by Christianity. The Christianisation of the "savages" is nearly complete. Having completely forgotten that in those very first seasons of contact white people would have all died were it not for marrying into natives and using their knowledge to survive this land.
So I'm willing to give these wooers a small window of reason. To me if I can say modern godliness is a trillionth possibility of representing truth, pagan and wiccans are more in the % to 1/oo of truthness. It's not a large window, but a window nonetheless. In addition, pagans/wiccans are usually anti-imperialist and anti-growth which I think are very important values that humanity has lost.
I do agree with you that modern "art" and godliness reside on the same side of the brain. :)
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Permalink Reply by Prog Rock Girl on
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But that's the thing...the valuable knowledge of indigenous peoples is actually much more scientific than the woo that people consider "going back to ancient wisdom" now. They had to be scientific to know how to hunt, figure out which plants were edible and medicinal, and ancient cultures also observed things about astronomy. Modern-day pagan religions are not the "old religion"; they are a new religion with a superficial homage to ancient religions.
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Permalink Reply by TNT666 on
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Well I wouldn't say scientific, because that involves the concepts hypothesis falsabiability, and statistical analysis, blind controls, none of which they did. I have no issues dissociating the concept of knowledge from the concept of science. I'll take pagan romanticism over snake oil romanticism any day :)
I guess I see a different "intent" to be dishonest. Snake oil peddlers are blatantly dishonest, as are astrologers/taroists.
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Permalink Reply by sacha on -
full moon and lunar effects
"...spooky effects have been ascribed to the phases of the moon....But when the statistics are redone properly, the correlation with lunar phase always evaporates....Yet many sensible people—including police officers and emergency room staff—continue to believe otherwise." --Steven Strogatz
The full moon has been linked to crime, suicide, mental illness, disasters, accidents, birthrates, fertility, and werewolves, among other things. Some people even buy and sell stocks according to phases of the moon, a method probably as successful as many others. Numerous studies have tried to find lunar effects. So far, the studies have failed to establish much of interest. Lunar effects that have been found have little or nothing to do with human behavior, e.g., the discovery of a slight effect of the moon on global temperature,* which in turn might have an effect on the growth of plants...
"...spooky effects have been ascribed to the phases of the moon....But when the statistics are redone properly, the correlation with lunar phase always evaporates....Yet many sensible people—including police officers and emergency room staff—continue to believe otherwise." --Steven Strogatz The full moon has been linked to crime, suicide, mental illness, disasters, accidents, birthrates, fertility, and werewolves, among other things. Some people even buy and sell stocks according to phases of the moon, a method probably as successful as many others. Numerous studies have tried to find lunar effects. So far, the studies have failed to establish much of interest. Lunar effects that have been found have little or nothing to do with human behavior, e.g., the discovery of a slight effect of the moon on global temperature,* which in turn might have an effect on the growth of plants...
continued here
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Permalink Reply by Dennis on -
My father (a retired police officer) explained to me, many moons ago, that the crime rate did rise on a full moon because it was easier for the burglars to see. Using a flash light can get you unwanted attention.
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Permalink Reply by Carrot Hare on -
Thank you!
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Permalink Reply by Carrot Hare on
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I knew it! The idea that the moon affects us mentally simply doesn't make any sense to me, and I don't know much about anything to begin with. It's not just because I'm a skeptical person its cause the idea just sounds dumb.
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Permalink Reply by Vicky Borman on -
I feel your pain. I eventually realized that my mom is very willing to blindly follow and let others think for her. She went on about how immunizations are for sure linked to autism, was upset with "death panels", and was unaware the Bible had any contractions or morally questionable material. As she was spouting off about the first two (to the choir ladies right after church no less) I did pop in and correct her as the other ladies were eating it up.
It was weird realizing that my mom is, for lack of a better word, a sheep. She even asks my dad who she should vote for right before she leaves to vote. I'm pretty sure she doesn't even know the some of candidates names, let alone their positions before she asks. I'm pretty much the opposite of her (cruising opencongress.org is one of my favorite things to do).
But, unconditional love is just that, unconditional. We love them even if they believe crazy stuff; After all they loved us when we had imaginary friends and thought the boogeyman lived under our beds.
As a side note, with the full moon thing any possible effects (like a increase in crime) could be also attributed to people conforming to the idea that these things are supposed to happen on a full moon night.
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Permalink Reply by Carrot Hare on
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Oh yeah that too. I had a friend who was the most steriotypical indi, artist type girl you'd ever meet. She had the whole dread and chucks thing down to a tee and she AAAALWAYS asked me to go clubbing with her on full moon nights. She kept telling me that going out on a full moon was exciting because weird supernatural stuff always happens, and she had made it her mission to prove to me all that crap existed.
BTW, she dropped out of the course and had to take summer school to get her certificate. I was one of the best students and she one of the worst. I'm not saying it was because I actually paid attention to my work while she brought astrology books to class and constantly told me stories about her trips to fortune tellers but...
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