Monday, March 16, 2020

Eleven Myths Promulgated by Our Fear Mongers



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.

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