I’m watching Religulous during morning Wii Fit step time. It’s fairly interesting, and might be more so if it weren’t such familiar ground already, but it’s also a great example of how easy it is to make people look stupid.
Granted, some of the people were cooperating strongly, but the people he agreed with get to speak entire passages and the ones he doesn’t get heavily edited, with scenes of other stuff interspersed. I think there are enough people willing to say stupid things about religion that he could have avoided those cheap effects.
The problem here is in getting people to say silly things about religion and then concluding that there’s a problem with religion. You could just as easily get people to say silly things about love, money, food, or any other popular topic. That shows that people are often silly, not that there’s something intrinsically wrong with these basic topics.
I had a virtual meeting yesterday morning with one of the developers for a software company I work for. He was showing me a program he’d done. I’ve sat in on the meetings for programs of this kind before, and he started off the same: namely, behaving as though he were training me to use it. However, since it was just the two of us and we were essentially being paid for him to explain things to me, I went ahead and asked him the questions I needed answered instead, and he was very cooperative after the initial shock wore off. That was helpful, and I hope I can get the same guy to explain things again in future.
Today I have a physical world meeting with a client and the designer. I’m looking forward to it, since that’s pretty rare. In between now and then I have a really large amount of work to do.
I need to quit panicking over it. I called #1 daughter at one point to discuss a proposal she’s doing, and her bf picked up the phone. I told him things were a bit overwhelming, and he said, “Just remember: they’re all waiting for you.” Not that comforting, actually.
But everything will get done eventually. If things settle down a bit at some point, I really need to catch up on my Amazon reviews and also on learning things. In this field, you have to learn new things all the time, and I haven’t even finished learning the old things yet.
Something to look forward to.
Good point about finding people to say something *silly* about any topic… the problem, however, is that many of those silly religious ideas are very widespread. They aren’t really the fringe. And they spring from a very literal interpretation of religious texts, so it is there as a foundation, for the taking.
I agree that people say silly things on a number of topics all the time.
Don’t get discouraged about finding new things to learn all the time. It means that you’re still growing as a person. It means you’re alive and interested.
When there’s nothing left to learn, you’ll be on the downward slide into Alzheimers or something similar. And you’ll be pretty boring!
With any luck, there will be new things to learn for the rest of your life!
Happy Good Friday!