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“Added Fast” purpose: Allow Mike Caro to post spontaneous thoughts, tips, and information.
- Includes Mike’s notes to himself.
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Few things make me sadder than to see intellectual tolerance disappear from the American pond of wisdom.
Sometimes this evaporation of intellect happens because some left-wing — liberals/“progressives” — are enraged and blinded by dissenters who attempt to apply logic against core beliefs. Sometimes it happens because some right-wing — “conservatives” — are enraged and blinded by their excessive social morality and religious zeal.
These are my thoughts after watching Fox News (which I often tune into, among other news broadcasts with different perspectives) devote too much air time expressing emotional anger against a billboard by American Atheists.
Billboard
Here’s the billboard…
Looking at it from the perspective of a person who’s still searching for spiritual truth — not currently Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Hindu, Scientologist, Buddhist, or anything — I find this billboard absolutely brilliant intellectually. I’m not saying that I like the message — only that it’s brilliant.
And, yet, not one broadcast discussion seemed to grasp its meaning. Commentators seemed to see only that it was about the depicted young girl saying she wanted to skip church because she was too old for fairy tales. They attacked that. They likely would have also attacked it had they understood it fully, of course. And then their objections would have been more meaningful.
That’s what I mean by being intellectually blinded. You could argue that the billboard is inappropriate or that it’s too in-your-face to be good public relations. Fine. But it’s still brilliant, because it’s much deeper than any of the analysts could see. Blinded is the right word for their thought process, because they were emotionally prevented them from seeing the obvious message.
Santa
The message isn’t merely that the girl wants to skip church on Christmas, because Christian teaching constitutes a “fairy tale” in the opinion of these atheists. It’s that she’s writing to Santa Claus, for God’s sake! We adults know Santa is a myth, but the girl doesn’t. She sees one “myth” and not the other. That’s why the message is so powerful on an intellectual level, although it might not be effective as advertising.
The fact that educated people discussing the billboard didn’t grasp the meaning of this clear message disturbs me. Too often, I think, reasoning is circumvented by emotion. Contemporary logic and intellectual tolerance suffer. Case in point.
— MC | Follow-up link: → None
NOTE: If you want to learn about my personal quest for spiritual understanding, try this Poker1 entry: → Sitting out Easter in the Bible Belt
Also see: → Why a Poker1 “Fast” category? | → All Poker1 “Fast” entries