Do your own research?

I might still be religious if the creationist community didn't exist. I met a lot of creationists in college. It was a mild culture shock. I believed in God and evolution. No issues.

They kept pestering me to look into the arguments. Long story, short: I eventually did. I just kept finding liar after liar. Found the lies didn't stop on at pseudoscience either.

Thank you, creationist community. My life is better now.

This one makes my teeth itch

It touches on the core of how people become radicalized.

They have the horse blinders on and also have the fucking mouthpiece attached that makes them spew the rhetoric they see on headlines of Fox. And don’t you dare ask for any further details because that’s just asking to hear the same headline again

Ding ding. Imagine getting objective feedback from peers and experts instead of your immediate family for four years?

Imagine seven years?

Imagine eleven years?

It's Conservatives whose beliefs are founded on feelings, not on objective reality. The proof is that most of them didn't go to college, so they can't possibly be founding their beliefs on something objective.

"Family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."

Yeah, I was thinking this is just straight up projection

Nah, too self aware to be conservative. They've already done their research in the form of listening to half a dozen right-wing commentators. They're all saying the same thing so that must make it true.

I would say something like "this comic goes both ways" but it is way too stupid anyway so im not giving it any credit.

A lot of everyone feels this way, really.

If the world will suddenly give birth to an ultimate rational argument to go conservative, we'll face the same issues. It's just that for now feeling and understanding coincide.

It is very important to keep in mind when holding any political discussion. We can be wrong. We are emotional about our positions. Doesn't necessarily make them any wrong, just makes us attached to them beyond pure absolute cold reason.

There was literally a popup that I saw posted on here a little while ago from r/conservative that tells you essentially "this is a conservative safe space, difference of opinion is not welcome, we do not wish to have outsiders try to change our beliefs. This is for conservatives to discuss conservativism."

They're a fucking joke.

And masterful gaslighters

You know it because it's not Democrats that are 'losing' their friends and family.

There goes every doctoral thesis.

And projection

There's no smaller seed than a mustard seed

There might be more to that one than you think.

Here was the only group in antiquity with a different explanation for the sower parable (that it was about physical creation of the cosmos) talking about the mustard seed:

That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed

• Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4

This group kept describing seeds as being indivisible points that make up all things and were the originating cause of the universe.

Language pretty much straight out of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura where describing the atomism of Epicureanism for a Roman audience couldn't use the Greek atomos ('indivisible') and used the word for 'seed' instead.

In a book widely popular in the Roman empire 50 years before Jesus was born.

In fact, Lucretius's book is not only the only surviving book from antiquity to explicitly describe survival of the fittest being the mechanism by which mutants in nature survived or died off based on adaptation, but specifically used the language of "seed falling by the wayside of a path" to describe failed biological reproduction.

Again, in a book 80 years before a guy allegedly talking about how only what survived of randomly scattered seeds multipled and the seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not. In a public saying that was the only one in the earliest gospel to canonically have a "secret explanation" later on. Why were they so threatened by this saying?

There may have been more to the context around what these sayings about seeds from a guy killed by request of religious orthodoxy leadership were about in a culture where also from the 1st century a Rabbi was recorded as saying "why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean."

Don't just take at face value what cannonical Christianity says with its damage control versions of secret explanations and boring ass nonsense about 'faith growing.'

Don't forget the fact that the Bible requires that any woman who isn't a virgin when married be executed. So, pretty much every republican woman.

If they actually followed the Bible, there wouldn't be any Republicans left.

Fun fact: Modern science does not say that there are only two biological genders but that even on a biological level, there is a spectrum. For example, there are measurable differences between the brains of a woman and a transgender man and there are more viable chromosome combinations than XY and XX.

Basic biology: there are 2 genders

Basic math: 15 is not divideable by 4

biological gender

Is that something like clockwork joke or liquid ennui?

Because of the fact that it takes roughly 100,000,000 years for DNA to double in complexity, some scientists have estimated that we actually are closer to 7 billion years of necessary evolution to create us. That just raises more questions though since our planet is around 4.5 billion years old.

The content is great!

• the original comic is exactly why deprogramming cult members is hard: they recoil at the mere hint of a thought that the base of their community and identity might be wrong
• It's deeply ironic that deeply religious cult members like modern day US “conservatives” unironically post this comic

Unless they are alternative facts. Alternative facts are very feeling dependent.

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as, uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uhhh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us.

bOtH sIdEs!

Some people do form opinions based on reality...

And centrists, for that matter.

I’d say it’s true of idiots regardless of their political orientation, yes. But there exist non-idiots who can change their opinion

I mean you're right that we all form opinions based on emotions and the social pressure from our tribe, and it takes deliberate effort to counter that. I guess you're getting downvoted due to the echo of "both sides", but that wasn't how I read your comment.

If you can't describe at least a few downsides to your tribe's vision for humanity you haven't asked enough questions. Extremists, almost by definition, don't see the downsides to their own views. This is why they don't like "centrists"; we ask questions they don't like the answers to.

He has a point.