By Neece, on January 31, 2009, at 11:01 pm
So you’re a creationist or a fundamentalist, whatever. You know what? That’s fine. I don’t really care what you believe for yourself. Personally I don’t think you should be allowed to raise your kids in such a way as I think it’s cruel, but whatever. That’s just me being silly, thinking kids should have a fighting chance by teaching them what is real and how best to get along in the world, not teaching them that there was a talking snake and 2 naked people in a garden that screwed everything up for everybody. Oh, and a man died and came back to life and then flew to heaven and that’s why the kid drinks a sip of wine and eats a cracker every sunday. But oh yeah, Santa Claus was just a story his parents told him to keep him in line. Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Anyhoo… back [...]
By Neece, on October 12, 2008, at 8:52 am
Yesterday I confessed my addictions to woo and how I realized it was all a pack of lies and nonsense. It’s been hard to learn to think more critically and skeptically about pseudo-science (the fancy grownup term for woo). Unless someone teaches you how to think critically, there’s really no way to easily pick out the slick pack of lies and shiny bullshit for what it is.
For instance, I just found out last month that Airborne is not only pseudo-scientific and completely useless, but can also be harmful. And here I was, just the day before, trying to get my husband to take it for an oncoming cold. Sigh…. The battle never ends.
For me, my bullshit radar with religion is very sensitive. Then again, if it’s about an invisible man in the sky, it’s complete nonsense, so that’s pretty easy. But when it [...]
By Neece, on October 11, 2008, at 4:42 pm
Lately I’ve been talking to Jane. (not her real name) I am having trouble talking to her, and I think I figured out why. We knew each other about 10 years ago in a state far, far away. We were acquaintances, but we had a lot in common. (here’s where I tell you some dark secrets) We were into many different kinds of woo.
Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.
I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of “magical” principles to energy that science just hadn’t quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had [...]
A Happy, Frustrated Atheist