Onward!

Okay, now that the messy rebuttal work is out there, I can turn to more interesting and generic things. The debating doesn't have to end there and I'll gladly accept hate mail from anyone out there, but there doesn't seem to be opposition to make writing meaningful anymore.
So how about a broader picture of what is goin on in the world today? Or maybe you want to know a little bit about the guy you're writing your hate mail to. I'll go for both.

I was raised a Catholic. My entire family is roughly 95% Irish and belief in magic might run in the family, you could say. I went to a Methodist preschool and then moved on to a K-8 Catholic school. Once in high school, I was happy to move away from the caged atmosphere, but still missed alot of the people and friends from there. I ended up joining the church youth group, where I had an extensive amount of time and information to figure out how I was supposed to defend the fact that I am a Christian (let alone a Catholic) and how anyone who denies what I believe is misguided and possibly headed for an eternal sentence to Hell. I wouldn’t say this was an extremist church—but then again, what would that mean? Watering down doctrine and not taking the Bible literally just means that you concede with secular values on some things, but disagree on the things that have no consequence. Catholics (and I use this only because I am most familiar with it, and it is the largest and most powerful branch after all) will say they believe in transubstantiation of the host, but go flaccid on self-contradicting passages and Old Testament myths. Either the Bible was divinely inspired or it wasn’t.

However, I think I picked up a good understanding of why people believe in all of this. It’s virtually the same as the attitude expressed on Fox news around the clock. It goes something like this, “Liberalism is a disease trying to create chaos and detract us from the solid foundation of values that have always served society well.” Conservatism spells out its purpose in the name: holding on to the past. Everything about it is nostalgic. In a Freudian kind of way, being fully conservative is a wanting to return to the womb. Our parents are the ultimate source of comfort, or something similarly tethered to the past. Liberals, on the other hand, face the world head on and make what little progress is possible in the world. Not to say that all out superficial acceptance of anything new is the way to go, but think about the fact that it was the radical liberals who were abolitionists. Galileo and the American revolutionaries were radical liberal types as well. All progress is made by those who learn from the past and move on. Today, it seems that homosexual union and stem cell research are crazy ideas, but they will surely be added to the list of forehead-slapping developments that are hard to imagine not understanding before. It’s astounding that Darwin is still on the debate table, but that’s a separate argument I shouldn't have to return to.

I know everyone uses the candy-coating of “I used to be one of them...” but it only works in a progressive sense. I was a firm supporter of Bush up through the 2004 election, before I realized that I was a fan of him only because I was as ignorant about the issues as he was. Conservatism is regressive, and liberalism is progressive. To say that you once were deluded, but came to understand something means you made a progressive growth spurt. Education is an ever expanding series of reaching new planes of understanding, and being able to look back down at the limited perspective you once had. This is the view of science and liberalism: by releasing attachment to childish biases and preconceived notions, we can use logic to climb higher and make progress. Conservatism and religion assume that mom, pop, and the people living in the Dark Ages had things right and there is no reason to question any of it. Knowledge is power. It’s what separates us from our ancestors.