WesDym
@bmacDonald94 Heinlein had a lot of witty things to say, but many were just condescendingly snotty, like this. In his defence, he grew up in a time when men were also blamed for alcoholism as 'weak'; so he was accurately piping the thinking of his time in this, and many of his contemporaries would have agreed. I don't hold it against him, but it's outdated thinking.
Religion is in fact more like an addictive drug, and it is more effectively regarded and treated the same way.
WesDym
@bmacDonald94 Simple reduction, while emotionally satisfying or intellectually tidy, cannot solve such complex problems. RAH was right in his purpose, but wrong in his approach. You can't cure an addict by insulting them. And if you want them to recover for YOUR sake, then it's self-defeating to use that tactic. You must understand greed and religion as pathologies which CAN be mitigated, but not through primitive emotional brutality.
WesDym
@bmacDonald94 Problem is, he's arguing against the nature of humanity itself. And he did so with courage and just cause, but also in ignorance. We now know that these habits are instinctive, very deeply embedded in our evolved neurology. And we know why: They served evolutionary ends when we were hunting and gathering on the Serengeti a quarter million years ago.
They frustrate civilization, though, and that's a modern challenge. But it's much harder than RAH seemed to believe.
Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸
@wesdym
'"Snotty" seems a very useful word. Have to use it more often. Basically all the "New Atheists" , all the teenage-boy-alt-righter-"libertarian"-autharitarians , anybody you can imagine yelling "HA! gotcha" , and then a Beavis-and-Butthead-laugh. @bmacDonald94
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.