Rando love original genius like Trump!

Rando like everyone else. Post kittehs because kittehs and why not? Post pretty rock because Rando ooh shiny hour, um, minute should be your ooh shiny hour, um, minute! Yeah! Rando post news because Rando like being angry and wants to share because Rando good. Anger fun! Yay!

Rando also share sciency things because Rando like Star Trek and walls that have tubes all over them and the way sciency things look and now Rando want toy of that. Share shiny sciency thing make Rando look smart. Rando smart!

Sometimes Rando even share spiritual things because that mean Rando good! Rando not bad! Not, not, not really bad. Rando good!

But Rando also think science and religion are separate magisteria. Rando just mean it differently because Rando love Humpty Dumpty. Rando mean just what he mean and he say it that way. Rando just like his spirituality without science in it and his science without spirituality in it. Unlike a Reese’s cup, those two tastes don’t go great together.

Rando think purpose is kind of teleological. Isn’t it? What about our peculiar assemblages of quantum particles and spaces and fields has “purpose,” per se? Do they come together and break apart in astronomically large numbers with a purpose, or just because that’s their nature? However many orders of organization you layer on top of that, aren’t those layers of organization simply emergent phenomenon? Or is there there an implication here that there is some higher order cause governing the behavior of those countless quantum particles and their even more countless interactions over billions of year such that Facebook using bags of meat like us would congeal into our present forms, mostly blithely unaware that we occupy only the tiniest little window of time between the species that was our progenitor and the species to which we’ll eventually give rise provided we don’t first destroy ourselves?

By asserting purpose, is the implication really that there is a designer? We walk along a sidewalk and see a leaf on the ground. On what basis do we arrive at the conclusion that some child put it there because she thought it looked nice then ran off when her mom called from down the block absent any reason to think that the case? Especially when there are so many more likely scenarios? 

What then of a supposition that the leaf must clearly have been put there as a sign to us by some ethereal being with magical powers? Yet there are those who will even suppose that the leaf, or the universe, or the multiverse is itself evidence of something even far more outrageous to reason, because if we can’t possibly imagine the complex mathematics that led to the present moment as revealed to our senses, somehow some of us are empowered to mistake the fluxes in their neurochemical balance for imagination for reality to the extent that blood should be spilled over wild differences in imagination, itself merely an emergent phenomenon, emerging as it does from one’s peculiar confluence of neurochemistry and time and place with their attendant circumstances.

Bad science pages make Rando sad.

The above was shared over on the Facebook page Critical thinking and logic.

Isn’t it just horrible how some people leap at the chance to express contempt for their fellow person who happens to be a photographer with no thought of their well being? It’s almost like they see more value in a strange dog than they do in the person taking the photo, else, lacking context and seeing only a momentary phenomenon, they’d be at least as likely, maybe more, to leap to the defense of the person, sharing as they do in the photographer’s humanity. It would still be an error in thinking. Jumping to a right conclusion is as bad as jumping to a wrong conclusion insofar as both leaps lack reason.

It’s by erring the one way rather than the other that such a person reveals their own values. It’s kind of ironic, really. They see themselves as the morally superior adversary in a contest before the contest has even begun, then damn someone else for a deficit of character by convicting before the facts are even all in.

Their probable defense, if my anecdotal experience is any guide? I’m speculating, but I bet it sounds a lot like, “Well! At least I show that I have the kindness in my heart to care for animals, and that‘s the point!” Good luck getting that sort to candidly address their newly compounded character deficit.

After all, first there’s the prideful boast while still implying that a) the rational observer doesn’t even get their point (oh, how well we often do), and b) that they’re now shifting their baselessly condemnation to the rationalist, impugning their adversary’s character by asserting their tacit claim that having warm feelings for strange dogs is a virtue in and of itself while highlighting that, by the rationalist not making his or her emphasis the same as their accuserss, it’s still a deficit in character. Somehow. By golly.

Then there’s still the maligned photographer, condemned without sufficient reason. One tells them, “you’ve wrongly defamed that person,” and rather than make it right, for whatever motive they’d as soon leave the injured party unjustly maligned. Because that’s a hallmark of superior morality or something.

Again, it’s conjectural on my part, but 51 years of dealing with people has taught me that it’s the rare person who, presented with a potentially embarrassing moment like this (never mind their willingness to subject someone else to such an emotional state, and baselessly, at that), will simply admit their error and seek to avoid similar such rash judgments in the future.

One can’t just guess at their motives for the evasion, however. Simply asking why they won’t address their evident superior valuation of animals over humans while claiming some kind of superior humanity will probably just lead to another evasion, maybe even some kind of pretentious righteous indignation, but at that point at least the honest combatant in this contest of reason has evidence that the evasion is indeed willful. Because willful evasion is also a marker of superior morality, something something you’re just mean.