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Walk by Sight

by January 2, 2010 5 Comments

Greetings, Dear Readers.

If you are lucky enough to catch this post, then you will have stumbled upon the first of many entries in my new weekly blog: Jesse Battles Ridiculousness. Herein will lie one of the few places left in this vast world of ours where TalkingScience and Science Friday lovers alike can seek refuge and enjoy the sanctuary of a land (or Web page) where only facts, evidence and logic reign supreme and are the necessary cornerstones to every argument presented.

That is not to say that this is an environment safe from the ridiculousness and blatant fallacies that plague our very society. On the contrary, here they will have a very present place and an extremely important role to play, for their mere existence makes this blog possible.

The only difference is this: here, and only here, all the ridiculousness in the world cannot come to harm you.  Instead, it will instead be exposed for your own entertainment and enlightment. I ask you to think of this blog as a zoo for the wacky and irrational notions we face every day as we go through life.

Here you will laugh and relate, as I use the power of science and the written word to showcase and defeat the ridiculousness I encounter, as you all do, over the course of our many travels. Here I will tackle the issues that face our civilization every day and explain in the most scientific of ways exactly how, what should otherwise be benign, problems are holding back our very society in the most ludicrous and absurd ways.

Ridiculousness comes in many forms: conversations, bumper stickers, mainstream news.  So you must be prepared at all times to face it.  For the first exposure I will relate to you, ridiculousness comes in the form of a very large and public sign.

This sign, the size of the average billboard, is hung alongside of a building, located on the very block I grew up on, on New York City’s Upper West Side. The building belongs to an organization that for the most part champions an ideology based on ignoring the insurmountable evidence of the physical world and replacing it with their own version of the truth based on a storybook written over two thousand years ago. Now I promise you, you have heard of this organization; in fact, statistically speaking, you are most likely a member yourself. If you haven’t figured it out already, the quote on the sign ought to jog your deductive skills.  It reads “We walk by faith, not by sight.”

Let’s think about this for a moment. Read the quote aloud; let it roll off your tongue; grant yourself a whiff of the ridiculous aroma emitting from those seven words.  “We walk by faith, not by sight.” There is now no longer any need for me to write down the identity of this organization, it is more than implied.

I have chosen to analyze this particular passage for my first blog entry because  I believe it sums up rather nicely the source of most of my crossing paths with the ridiculous. Think about what it is basically telling you to do:  forget about sight, forget about truth or reason,  and trust blindly in something intangible, unprovable and supposedly infallible. That phrase is the ultimate tool of the brainwasher. It is a command to ignore logic and evidence, to shun challenging and thought-provoking sources and to simply have faith in an artificial truth. It is the root cause of the mind numbing epidemic of selective exposure that is spreading throughout an ever more partisan nation, which is precisely why it is one of the main origins of ridiculousness found all around us.

Science and religion are both quests for answers. I have had conversations where people have argued that there is no real difference in which one you believe; they both can’t be 100% proven.  While that argument may be valid to some extremely minor extent, there is a difference--a major one. Although science has proven very fallible in the past and still is today, it is the first to admit it. Religion requires you to sacrifice all you know about the world you live in order to conform your life to a series of rituals and ancient beliefs for reasons that are “just beyond man’s comprehension.”   The scientist takes nothing on faith and will derive his/her truth from data collected through a strenuous method of trial and error. To “walk by faith, not by sight,” is to ignore the valuable knowledge reaped from that method, and to embrace a life where you walk with a kaleidoscope attached to your head, forcing you to see reality in distorted fragments, condemning you to never truly viewing what lies before your eyes. This creates a situation where there is nothing to prevent you from jumping off a cliff, if you believe that will lead to your salvation. So in order to avoid a population running around outside my apartment, more or less blindfolded, I ask you, please for the good of mankind, walk by sight.

Be Skeptical, Be Critical, Take Nothing On Faith.

All the best,
Jesse M. S.

    

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  • Aleks

    Science is bliss, but can it replace religion. Or could it become the religion of science. Scientology.

  • KK

    I think you bring up a very good point. There is nothing wrong with religion, but blind faith - the idea that science is some sort of liberal evil is a real problem in today's society. It's like the dark ages all over again when you listen to Palin supporters.

    I'm excited for next week's blog :)

  • Jane

    If your eyes are opened in faith first then it gets you beyond the things we see with our eyes. Who would go into a dangerous situation if we didn't have faith that we could make a difference?

  • Jenni M

    I agree with both KK and Jane, because they both make excellent points. Science (Sight) should be what we walk by because it is proven by fact/trial & error, and to completely ignore fact is ridiculous and will only lead you into trouble. However, Jane does make a point that not everything can be explained by science and reasoning. Despite the fact that the "gut reaction" has been proven by scientists as legitimate, it is a reaction that does not rely on reasoning and practical thinking. Gut decisions aren't made because of facts, they are made purely on emotion and faith. Sometimes, without any evidence at all, people just get very "yucky" or bad feelings about a person. These decisions are made by the unconscious part of a person's brain. There have been people in history who had great success, and this success was not inevitable because of overwhelming fact or rational thinking. The success came from faith and gut feelings. Martin Luther King, Jr. had very few people on his side when he first started preaching the idea of white and black equality, and facts at the time told King that he would never make a huge difference in the African American struggle. Yet he just had this gut feeling that he WOULD make a difference, and he did. The same type of situation occured with people like Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and countless other individuals. These people had very few if any fact or reasoning backing them up in their quest to be famous and become influential public figures. They only had faith. If we always relied on reasoning, we would never take healthy risks that could in the end change our lives dramatically for the better. If we risk nothing and leave nothing to faith alone, we risk everything.

  • Jacks

    I must admit it has been far to long since I last perused this site. I used to check it for a little while but it seemed nothing was changing, no one was blogging so I stopped. I am back and I like what I see: activity, intelligent entries, back and forth discussions, I even saw that Dr. Molly got 8 separate comments on one of her articles. I love this site, I intend to be more active on it, and I want everyone else to continue being active on it, but now I am mad.

    I started checking this site because I wanted to have intelligent discussions (blogscussions?) with scientifically minded laypersons. I am not a specialist nor a brainiac but neither am I a dullard or completely unversed in scientific dialogue/literature/process what-have-you. This site seemed just right for me but only lacks participants. I understand you are trying to breath some life into this blog/website and writing about inflammatory subjects is one way of doing so. My criticism is this---RELIGION IS NOT A SUBJECT FOR SCIENCE AND HAS NO PLACE ON A SCIENCE FORUM.

    Please, please, please do not attempt to engage religious fanatics, or bring "spirituality" into a scientific discussion. It can only bring us pain and sadness, and here is why [I think this].

    Religion is not based in rationality, or evidence, or reason, or anything that "scientists" consider sacred. It is based in faith. We can not prove there is not a god and until we can (and maybe not even then) it is useless to talk about it. Let them have their faith, their myths, their little fantasies just don't let them steal from us our one safe space. It has not happened yet but if I have to read some comment about how "science never proved nothin'" or how I must have faith to believe in science I am going to sever my carotid with a petri dish shard.

    Sorry, I am a bit of a sarcastic bastard...can I say bastard?

    But it is not that I think a little faith is a good thing, I am a staunch atheist so I am not even conceding that they may have a point. The thing is, and don't take this the wrong way, they are right and so you can not argue with them. It is absolutely possible that God made everything a few thousand years ago or a few minutes ago and just planted all this evidence perfectly so it would seem like there is a cause/effect logical explanation for it all. And it is absolutely true that science never proved nothin' (in the vernacular sense not the double negative sense). Although the law of thermodynamics has successfully predicted the outcomes of dozens, maybe even hundreds of experiments, there is only circumstantial (albeit a mountain the size of 80 suns) evidence that it is correct. Science has disproved an untold countless number of things but because the existence of God is not testable it is not our business. In addition I have heard plenty of scientists get far too holy and dogmatic and I know several people of faith whose opinions I cherish and whose judgment I would rarely question. By way of criticism, Jesse, your blog was becoming a bit dogmatic itself. A person wearing a kaleidoscope through life would actually see the actual world as it existed for everyone, they would merely have a different perspective.

    So I have already wasted too much of everyone's time with this but it is my meager appeal to everyone participating in this blog that we make this a safe space for scientifically minded people. Or if this is something that other people actually want to discuss, maybe there could be a separate forum for that.

    All that being said, I more or less agree with Jesse.
    Jacks