Setting Limits

YOU HAVE TO DRAW LINES, set limits, establish boudnaries, set standards. Everyone agrees on this. You can only take so much. Patience and tolerance are wonderful vittues, to a point. At some point, you run out of both, become exhausted. I have reached the end of my rope with several categories of people, people who, upon closer scrutiny, actually belong to the same general category - the category of people who choose to deny realtty for the sake of ideological expediency, cognitive and emotional harmony and comfort. Those categores are: people who embrace Trump's big election lie, and who refuse to unconditionally condemn Trump's violent insurrection which resulted. I cannot respect such people. They should know better. They should be ashamed of themselves. Likewise, people who refuse to accept the reality of human made climate change, and who insist that either it is a hoax, or that humans have nothing to do with it. Climate deniers I have run out of patience with. They are, in effect, traitors to America, to humanty, to nature, indeed, to God. But that's not all. There's more. People who insist that Darwinian human evolution by natural selection is false, and who embrace biblical creationism as the only absolute truth, I condemn, without reservation, as willful blindness and ignorance. Surely the purpose of religion is not to encourage people to believe in nonsense. If it is, to whatever extent it is, religion is harmful, and should be abolished. And we must not exclude from our list of unacceptable people those who so fervantly embrace their own religious beliefs that they insist that anyone who does not share them is condemned to eternal damnation and torment in the afterlife. In other words, if you believe in hell, and you believe that anyone who does not accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior is doomed to spend an eternity in it, I comdemn you, unconditionally. Furthermore, I insist that if anyone actually spends an eternity in hell, which I doubt, then it will be you, the religious fascist. Hell, if you even believe in hell at all, I'm done with you; you're mentally ill, sadistic. Often, it is observable that the same people who believe in any one of these idiotic beliefs believes in them all. Often,,they're conservative Christians, often Trump supporters. A venn diagram representing all of the above false beliefs would intersect them all in the middle, and would encompass a fair percentage of the community of false believers. If you deny evolution and climate change, chances are you deny Trump's loss to Biden too. Whoever embraces one idiotic false belief tends to embrace many. Another pattern is more pervasive still; the commmunity of believers in these falsehoods tends to have another striking common characteristic; a lack of education. A lack of formal schooling, lack of history, biology, and chemistry classes in the old academic record. A lack fo college and even high school degrees. They may have a skill or skills. They may be first class plumbers, farmers, machanics, or whatever, smart, knowledgable, successful people, but nonotheless they are people without good training in the sciences and social sciences, including history, economics, and literature. tThe more educated people become in general science and history, the more likely they are to accept the reality of climate change, evolution, and Biden's election, and the less likely to believe in imaginary places like hell and in false beliefs, like eternal damnation for non believers. And, last but not least, the more formally educated people are, the more likely, much more likely, they are to be liberal, what we now call "progressive". Conservatism can be seen as a function of ignorance.