Our leaders: political, religious, media, and business, have
found that the fear of loss is a much greater motivator than the hope of gain. Trying to motivate a comfortable person is
difficult without inducing fear in them.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads
to a loss of reasoning power, hence our current lack of logic and common
sense. Anger also leads to hate, and we
see plenty of that around us. Because
so much power and money is involved, it’s useful to recognize many myths that
are promulgated by those that benefit from fear.
1. 1
“Communism,
Capitalism and Socialism” are 19th century ideas that have been
shown to be total failures. All advanced
countries in the world today combine the features of capitalism to provide
incentives to those who are motivated and socialism for those who are unable to
fully take advantage of capitalism. The mere mention of the ISMS causes
hostility to fly. We should really be talking
about what risks do we cover as a society and which risks do we cover
privately.
2. 2
“Stealing Christmas” the stories about people
being forced to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” are just
plain stupid. With each major religion
having a holiday during this season, the Christian thing to do is to help
others celebrate. Besides the only first
hand story I have heard about this was a Jewish delicatessen owner with a
Jewish clientele. It sounds like a
Russian thing to me.
3. 3
“Bring prayer back into our schools.” Not being able to pray in school is
absurd. Anyone can pray anytime they
want in this country. There is certainly
an abundance of prayers during finals.
What is wanted is to be able to force others to pray as you do. If this passes, I wonder how prayers to Allah
will be handled. Maybe another Russian
thing.
4. 4
“They’re going to take my guns away.” What no one seems to say is: How? I’ve had 5 guns in my life and no government
entity had any knowledge of any of them.
Are we going to send people door to door? (Who would be that crazy?) We would need search warrants for every
house.
5. 5
The “Right to Life” group is intent on sending
doctors and women to jail in order to stop abortion. The truth is they will never be able to stop
it. It can be slowed down with education
and contraceptives, (and has been), but these aren’t in this groups’ vocabulary. The effort to turn fetuses into babies prior
to birth is a religious belief that the soul has entered the body prior to
birth. Why these haters of abortion
don’t accept the “Lords” eventual judgment and have to make their own about
other people is beyond me. Nobody is
forced to have an abortion.
6. 6
“If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist”
comes out of our ‘C’ suites in business and is moving into politics. It promotes money while denying love,
happiness, sadness, faith and security among others.
7. 7
“The Holy Scriptures teach you what to
believe”. If you’ve ever read them cover
to cover, it’s pretty obvious that the main concern is how to behave. If you behave according to the Scriptures,
you will know what’s important to believe.
Almost any belief can be found in the Scriptures if you look long
enough.
8. 8
“My opponent believes, (or does). . .” We can be almost certain that this is the
beginning of a lie or a gross exaggeration.
We must start listening to what the opposition says about itself in
order to understand it. We also have to
concern ourselves with what is or isn’t actually done by whom!
9.
“She/he did something awful years ago” Seems to
say that people and times never change.
Many things considered horrible now weren’t years ago and vice versa. People also change with the times and we
should be looking to their recent past to gauge their moral compasses. It’s important to remember that bad people
can do good things, and good people can do bad things on occasion.
10.
Name calling is a sure sign that the argument
can’t be won by logic.
11.
Climate change deniers are actually climate
change profiteers and we should be calling them that.
