Category Archives: science

Acceptability of evidence

Posted on by
Reply

Who decides what is considered to be evidence?

It’s a serious questions, because one of the common forms of demagogic trickery consists of confusing this issue, and so the opposing side implicitly assumes it has the right to arbitrarily accept or refuse the offered evidence. So basically I say that trees are living organisms, and the guy I’m talking to says “I dispute that”, and then what, I have to prove that trees are living organisms, or do I simply get to say “you are an idiot”? I actually prefer the latter option, because it is almost impossible to prove anything within the context of a discussion. You can only refer to research and evidence that has already been produced in a more formal setup, experimentally, and if someone refuses to accept that, you have a serious problem if you want to proceed with any kind of a discussion, because if you allow the opponent to control acceptance of evidence, he in fact gets to control who wins, because victory is defined by having the prevailing evidence on your side, and if someone decides what is accepted as evidence, he can rig the game.

For instance, I’ve seen extensive IQ studies based on statistical evidence proving racial differences, and it is all dismissed out of hand with the statement that “this has been refuted”. No, it wasn’t refuted, it was confirmed again and again and again, and it is being summarily dismissed by the leftists because it doesn’t agree with their beliefs and so “it must be wrong”, because racism or because Nazism. So if I allow my opponent to simply dismiss enormous body of work that is offered as evidence, and then proceed to say that my claims are unsubstantiated because there is no evidence for them, can the discussion really be continued? There really isn’t anything to talk about because it’s like dismissing spaceflight as evidence because someone says that nothing NASA publishes can be trusted. If you can’t rely on scientific research as evidence, what can you rely on, in a debate? You can’t really demonstrate any significant physics in a debate, except that water is wet and glass is breakable by smashing a glass of water on the floor. This very much limits the possibility of a debate between very different philosophies and worldviews, because admission of evidence is the point where the debate is decided in advance. Another problem is when your opponent cites a bullshit study you’ve never heard of, which for instance “proves” that there’s no gravity and that the impression of gravity on Earth is created because it keeps accelerating upwards at a rate of 9.81 m/s2. First he dismisses NASA as evidence, and then he offers this bullshit study as the truth, and when you dismiss it, the result is a false impression of equal fanaticism and stubbornness on both sides. The real truth is, you’re talking to an idiot, and if that truth isn’t openly acknowledged, you’re fucked by merely participating in a debate.

And now we come to the more important issue. In your personal life, who decides what is evidence, and what is acceptable? Is it you, or is it dictated to you? Are you free to make a personal judgment about acceptability of evidence?

How do you decide that your wife loves you? Do you say it can’t be determined because there’s no scientific backing for the claim? Do you dismiss your emotions as evidence because someone says they are not reliable? Or do you trust your own judgment and make up your own mind? How do you approach the question of God’s existence if you feel that God is present in your life and you feel that there is compelling evidence for accepting that He exists? If you cannot communicate this evidence to others, does it stop being evidence to you, personally? Is it a requirement that others must accept it, or it isn’t evidence? I don’t think so. It’s a complex thing, and what is evidence for a person, doesn’t necessarily need to be admissible to a court, or to science, but it doesn’t necessarily cease to be valid. For instance, there isn’t a reliable way for someone outside my room to tell whether I’m writing this text on my desktop computer or a laptop. When I connect to the CMS, it only sees the IP address of my router, with no identification of the internal IP address on the LAN which could indicate which machine was used to make the connection. The text would be the same in both cases. Anyone inspecting the CMS database wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You won’t be able to tell the difference. But I know which machine I used, I know I’m typing it into the desktop machine. I cannot reliably prove it to you, but I know it’s the truth – only I know the truth. The courts cannot know it, science cannot know it, but I know it. Is it less true because it isn’t scientific or communicable? If I write on this keyboard do I write less reliably because you cannot reliably know that I do? If I drink coffee from a cup, did I drink it less because there are no witnesses and you cannot know that I did? If I experienced God, directly and without any doubt on my side, is it less true because you cannot confirm it? But if that is the cornerstone of my personal understanding of reality, and it is not admissible as evidence in a debate, if others will not accept it and I cannot deny it, if my personal experience is incommunicably wider than others’, of what use is a debate? I can write my narrative, and it can be compelling or not to others. I can actually use spiritual powers to create spiritual experiences in others, but what it does is just create one more person that believes me, and one more person you will call crazy or deluded. So what it all comes down to is faith. You choose to believe certain things, and you accept evidence that supports your belief, and dismiss evidence that refutes your belief. Until you change your internal reasoning for acceptability of evidence, there’s nothing anyone can do to convince you. Long ago, I decided that it doesn’t matter. I will do my thing based on what I believe, and you will do your thing based on what you believe, and each choice will have consequences.

Leftist approach to reason and evidence

Posted on by
Reply

It’s interesting how some people, usually on the left political and intellectual spectrum, recommend that we all disregard our prejudice and make up our minds based on reason and evidence, and yet, when people do just that, and based on reason and evidence come up with conclusions different from theirs, they go absolutely fucking nuts.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you say that I should reject prejudice, I will do exactly that. I will reject the prejudice that people are equal and see the evidence. I will look into the statistics, I will look at the results, and I will make up my mind. If I don’t come to the same conclusion as you doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. Maybe it’s you who are not following your advice. Maybe it’s you who are prejudiced, only your prejudice is that of equality.

If you say that people should reject religious dogma and make up your own mind about the existence of God based on the available evidence, and I do exactly that and conclude that God indeed exists, and that religions are just a primitive way of dealing with that truth in an inept and clumsy way, similar to the ways in which cavemen dealt with subdural hematoma. They actually invented trepanation, removal of a part of the skull in order to let the brain expand and relieve intracranial pressure, and it was widely ridiculed in medical circles until quite recently the modern neurosurgeons discovered that craniotomy is the best way of dealing with that exact problem. So yeah, the cavemen were the stupid dumbasses who bored holes in people’s skulls to let the evil spirits out, except that the modern doctors also bore holes in people’s skulls in order to… what? So yeah, we follow the evidence. But I will also make up my own mind on what I consider to be evidence. If I’m to make up my own mind, I’ll be damned if I’ll allow someone else to dictate what I’m to do with this freedom. I will see for myself. So, if God exists, are there people who can attest to that? There are. Are they credible? Yes. Are there multiple testimonies that can be correlated? Yes. Do I have personal experiences that confirm that God exists? I do. So well, there you have it. I followed the evidence, I approached those things rationally, and I made up my own mind.

The fact that my mind didn’t turn out into a replica of yours should not surprise you, since you profess your support for “multiculturalism” and accepting differences. But that isn’t really the case, isn’t it? It’s only a pose. You only accept different opinions if they are the same as yours. You only say we should follow the evidence and reason and reject prejudice because you think you can order people around and dictate what the prejudice are, what the evidence is and what is the reasonable conclusion. Essentially, you have a playbook you want to impose on everyone, and the story about freedom and reason and evidence is just a collection of nice words that are supposed to cloud one’s judgement and blind him to the ugliness of what’s actually going on.

About science, verifiability and equality

Posted on by
Reply

Generally speaking, science is the best tool ever devised by mankind for the purpose of finding out the facts about the world. It provides us with the most accurate and verified information of all the sources of knowledge that we possess. It is more accurate than religion, it is more accurate than journalism, and it is much more reliable than politics. If you want to know something about the world, ask a scientist. Don’t ask a religious person or a politician.

On a more personal level, however, things are quite a bit different, because on a personal level, you can’t really verify science, and you don’t actually see it first-hand. You hear about science from the politicians and the journalists, or even worse, from the religious people, and what science survives this unreliable conduit is no longer science. It’s an interpretation of science that serves someone’s agenda, and to you personally, it’s served in form of a religion, which I call “scientism”. Scientism is the religion of science. It preaches salvation by science, and divides the world into scientific and falsehood. If there’s a scientific opinion about something, it’s a sacred dogma. If scientists agree on something, it’s to be viewed with the same worshipful reverence with which the Catholics view a council of the Church. If someone says a 97% of scientists agree on something, you don’t verify. You obediently comply and you don’t ask questions lest you be called one of those names that end all discussion and harm your chances of ever finding or keeping a job.

The problem is, the world isn’t neatly separated into science and falsehood. It’s separated into the part that is known to us and within our ability to process in any way, and the part that is completely beyond our grasp. The part that is within our ability to process is very small, and it is further divided into the part that the science has ways of dealing with, and the part that it can’t process because it’s incompatible with the scientific method. That’s why we have so much knowledge about chemistry and so little about human psyche; what we do know about human spirit is only the part that can be subjected to scientific analysis, and the psychologists like to believe that this part is much larger than my personal experience can attest.

There is also a big difference between science as a method, practitioners of scientific method, the scientific community, and the impression the general population gets about what it’s all about. What the general population thinks about science is basically what the newspapers and other media report. Think about it what you will, but I am less than pleased with my prospects of finding out any kind of objective truth with this method.

One of my problems with the so called “social media” is that it gives a platform to vocal but stupid people, who often know very little about what’s going on in the world, but they tend to have a huge following. Recently some ignorant musician went on a campaign to inform people that the Earth is really flat. There’s actually quite a following of conspiracy theorists who claim that NASA is all about computer-generated forgeries and that it’s actually impossible to go into orbit let alone to Moon and Mars, because the Earth is flat.

And that’s my main problem with the movie “Martian”. Regardless of how interesting and well made it is, it works with an implicit faulty assumption that we live in the same civilization that went to the Moon in the sixties and early seventies. We don’t. That then was a civilization ruled by white men who did what they thought was right and didn’t care much about anyone else. The result was that they stretched technology to the limits and did what people today would generally consider impossible, but not because it’s really impossible, but because they are stupid people whose arrogance and self-importance was inflated by the social media culture which conditioned them to believe that they are important and that they matter. Which they are not, and they don’t.

They are uneducated, because the education system in the West, and especially in America, under-emphasises hard science disciplines and a direct experimental approach, with the end-result of students getting degrees while thinking that it’s all just dogma whose purpose is to fill short term memory in order to pass the tests. On the other hand, what is over-emphasised is self-importance, self-confidence and rhetorical skills whose purpose isn’t to find out and defend the truth, but to win arguments for any side. Essentially, they are taught conceit and demagoguery, and that’s what we can see online – vain, stupid, conceited, argumentative people who post “selfies”, use the platform of social media to talk endlessly about their unimportant experiences and shallow thoughts, and never concede that they are wrong about anything.

As a result, this raises the noise floor so much, you can no longer reliably differentiate between the spikes of authentic signal and various social media propagandistic campaigns, with the end-result of nobody taking the serious stuff seriously, because we are repeatedly brainwashed with claims that everything is equally important and everybody matters. As a result, the civilization portrayed in the “Martian” doesn’t exist. It existed when Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev led the space programmes of their respective nations. It existed when important people were taken seriously, and stupid people didn’t have a platform from which to shout their worthless drivel, and as a result of them not having a voice, they couldn’t say stupid things and raise the overall civilizational noise floor.

What I’m saying here, is that ordinary people should be aware that they are not special. They are not important. Their opinions aren’t important, aren’t smart, aren’t well informed and, being aware of that, they should shut the fuck up and not drown out the voices of the few who actually have something important and relevant to say. The fact that everybody has a voice and a platform only served to reveal how stupid, unimportant and uneducated most people are, and why censorship and restricted access to public speaking platforms were such a great thing, that brought us to the Moon, gave us nuclear energy and produced all the great things of modern technology.

What social media gave us are the stupid conspiracy theorists who don’t know jack shit about how science and technology actually work, but who possess worthless degrees given to them by an education system that teaches people that truth doesn’t matter, that the facts don’t matter, but that presentation is everything.

As a result, we live in a civilization in which facts don’t matter, the truth doesn’t matter, and the media-created thoughtspace contains only presentation, propaganda, opinions and nonsense, and people like myself, who genuinely cut through that bullshit in search for truth and the facts are seen as some crazy right-wing kooks who say things that are completely out of touch with the stuff “everybody knows is true”.

Well, what you “know” is true is that 97% of scientists support the man-made global warming interpretation. That’s what the politicians tell you. That’s what the media tells you. But when someone actually bothered to ask the scientists, they said something quite different.

I once watched a Youtube movie called “Zeitgeist” that intends to reveal all the “bullshit” of religion, by uncovering all the “lies” Christianity, for instance, has been telling us. For instance, it states that Jesus is a myth, that stories about virgin birth are abundant in the Mediterranean circle of religions. I saw this movie because it was widely spread by “skeptics” and conspiracy theorists. Guess what, I actually bothered to be skeptical enough of the movie’s claims as to verify them, and found them to be complete and utter drivel. For instance, Krishna is quoted as an example of someone born of a virgin. Only he was his mother’s eighth child. This is something I noticed immediately because unlike the author of the movie, I actually know something. I proceeded to verify other similar claims, and they all fell apart, nothing even remotely makes sense when you look at the actual content of some belief, not the one-sentence presentation made by a liar and a conman. So, it appears that the self-proclaimed skeptics are the most gullible people you can ever meet. They will believe literally anything, as long as it isn’t the “official story”, and the cause of all this is that stupid, irrelevant, common people have been lead to believe that they are special, that they should question things and not simply accept them, and that narrative is everything and the facts are relative.

And when you have stupid people who are skeptical of what the smart people tell them, you get a doomed society.

Common people believe that we are all the same, that they are equal to the smart people, because they were never required to actually test this belief. If they were, their opinion of themselves as God’s special snowflakes would suddenly wane. At one point in life I was surrounded with average people who didn’t think I’m special because I looked like them, only more scrawny, I talked to them about the common banalities, but they heard that I’m supposed to be some Mensa-IQ guy so they got some IQ tests and offered that we solve them together, to see how we compare. I will never forget their faces when they saw with what ease I solved the test while they got stuck at the simplest questions, and not only did I do my test flawlessly, I simultaneously helped them with theirs. They felt humiliated, probably for the first time in their lives, and not because I laughed at them or made fun of them – on the contrary, I was as polite and forthcoming as always. It’s because for the first time in their lives they saw that not all men are equal, not because somebody told them, but because they were forced to confront the evidence in their living experience.

When people are told all the time that we are all equal, that IQ doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, that there is no more than 1% of difference between people, that all souls were made the same by God, they tend to believe that – “those scientists, they’re not really smarter, they are just deceiving us, but we know better”. I personally experienced many situations where I was faced with someone who knew much more about something than I did, and I couldn’t delude myself into thinking that we are equals; I was the stupid one, and if I wanted to overcome that I had to learn. I truly wish everyone had the same experience, and then this entire political correctness multicultural egalitarian bullshit would go away. There’s nothing more harmful to a civilization than belief that we are all the same and that everyone’s opinions and lives matter the same.

They don’t. Narrative is not all that matters. When some people succeed where others fail, it’s not due to discrimination, it’s because some people are better than others, and they are worth more. If you think you’re anyone’s equal, take an IQ test against a 1-percentile.

The meowing tree

Posted on by
9

I am now going to explain the line of reasoning due to which I believe that the near-death experiences should be explained by the most straightforward narrative, which says that those people indeed died and experienced the afterlife. The same reasoning applies for the spiritual experiences of the saints.

Years ago my wife and I were walking along a path and as we passed by a tree, it meowed at us. It was dark and we couldn’t see the cat on the tree, but although we couldn’t see it, it sounded like a young cat, and it wasn’t happy. Since it was too dark to do anything constructive about it, we went our way.

Now, if we didn’t believe in the existence of cats, or if we didn’t believe that cats can climb trees yet forget how to get down, we might have looked for another explanation; maybe someone placed an electronic device for reproducing sound on the tree. Maybe a man was on the tree, imitating a cat in order to fuck with us. Maybe it were little green men in flying saucers. Maybe.

We didn’t see direct evidence of cat on that tree, but we accepted the obvious explanation of the meowing tree, because we are informed and reasonable.

However, in the case of NDE experiences, some people would rather believe in the most idiotic, improbable and flawed explanations, just to avoid the obvious conclusion that if something meows at you from a tree in the dark, it must be a cat.

Skepticism as the ultimate douchebaggery

Posted on by
1

The role and character of skepticism are incredibly misunderstood.

Every now and then I hear how skepticism is essential to science, that it is in fact the cornerstone of scientific thought. Then, on the other hand, I hear how I should be skeptical of things I hear and believe only in what I personally can attest to with my senses – from people who try to convince me that Earth is flat, and everyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, crazy or criminal, because that’s what our senses tell us, that Earth is flat, that Sun and the stars are moving, and since we need to be skeptical of everything we can’t personally witness, what is one to do?

I encountered this uncritical praise of skepticism decades ago and my initial response was so unexpected and radical, that it probably didn’t make sense to most people then, because in the 90s the Moon landing skeptics and flat-earthers were almost nowhere to be found, and it seemed implausible that anyone in his right mind could espouse such ideas, but that exactly was my point, that skepticism isn’t about the right mind. Skepticism is a mental disease.

Skepticism is, essentially, the ability to question or dismiss something you don’t emotionally like. You don’t like heliocentrism so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. You don’t like the theory of evolution so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. It has nothing to do with science, because although it’s true that scientists can be skeptical of something and dismiss it, this is not an inherent part of scientific method. Scientific method is to test theories by experiment and change them if evidence doesn’t support them. This is not skepticism, it’s a feedback loop between theory and observation. It’s evidence-based rational thinking. Skepticism is an emotional response which takes place when your worldview is shaken and your favorite ideas are threatened. You are then defensive of your favorite ideas and skeptical of that which contradicts them. There is absolutely nothing even remotely scientific about it, because I can quote the trial of Galileo, which went something like this:

Inquisition: Sir, it came to our attention that you have been publicizing cosmological theories that contradict the holy scripture. Since you are a very famous scientist, we will now hear your explanation and, if we find it convincing, we are ready to offer a different interpretation of the parts of scripture that contradict your interpretation of the Universe.

Galileo: Thank you. Using magnifying glasses I made a telescope, which made it possible for me to observe otherwise invisible celestial bodies. This way I discovered that Jupiter has four satellites that revolve around it, which makes the geocentric theory, which states that all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth, implausible. From this I infer that the theory of Copernicus, which states that the planets actually revolve around the Sun and not the Earth, is true.

Inquisition: Your observation is very interesting, but does it really prove what you infer from it? Wouldn’t it be a more parsimonic conclusion if we said that both Jupiter and its satellites revolve around the same thing we previously assumed Jupiter to revolve around?

Galileo: You are all stupid unenlightened buffoons! (fuming)

Inquisition: Be it as it may, what we need to do is decide which theory is more consistent with available evidence. Our current Ptolemaic system is able to predict eclipses of celestial bodies with a certain degree of accuracy. Compared to that, what is the degree of accuracy of predictions made by your alternative heliocentric model?

Galileo: It is worse.

Inquisition: So what you are saying is that the system you are proposing we adopt as better has worse accuracy in predicting celestial events than the system we are currently using?

Galileo: Yes. However, the Ptolemaic system has been refined and improved for centuries, and mine is brand new, and needs much work in order to show its full potential.

Inquisition: But isn’t a better model supposed to immediately show its superiority by offering better predictions?

Galileo: Not necessarily, because we need to have faith that mathematics will be improved in the future, allowing us to refine the model and make sense of things in ways that are currently not possible.

Inquisition: So essentially you are asking that we have faith in your model, because at the moment evidence and reason argue against it?

Galileo: You are all stupid and don’t understand science! (stomps his foot helplessly)

Inquisition: We heard enough. We are going to stick with our “inferior” model which at the moment offers better accuracy in its predictions, thank you very much, and you sir are going to stop publicizing unproven theories as of now, and this is our official verdict.

I’m slightly embellishing the narrative for dramatic purposes but you get the picture. The Church actually approached the issue from the position of scientific skepticism, and Galileo needed to resort to faith. The trick is, they were both right and wrong. The Church was right not to embrace a model which was based more on sacred geometry than on mathematics and physics, and Galileo was wrong to recommend official adoption of a model that obviously wasn’t ready. The right thing to do would be to concede that Galileo’s model is a contemporary equivalent to the superstring theory: it looks like a promising direction in which to look for potential solutions, but the mathematics doesn’t yet work, the theory doesn’t predict anything well and it simply isn’t ready for mainstream. However, the main stream theory is ugly enough and bad enough for one to rightly conclude that it can’t be really true, because something as inelegant can’t be the right answer, so it’s warranted to look into alternative directions, based merely on faith and aesthetics.

Where I agree with Inquisition is that Galileo needed to be told to shut the fuck up until his theory is ready for peer review. However, they were wrong to put their confidence in the Ptolemaic system just because it worked better and agreed with their scripture. They knew something was wrong with it but they chose the easy way, and that’s the main reason behind their skepticism – not some great love for the truth, but inertia and spiritual laziness.

Galileo, however, was an arrogant, pompous fool and was more wrong than right about anything. He was actually on the bad side of science regarding the tides and the comets, for instance, and gets so much undeserved credit in the history of science only because it serves a popular myth of science vs. Church, which was hugely popularized with the invention of the printing press. He happened to be right regarding the structure of the Solar system, but only based on aesthetics and faith. He didn’t have any actual science to back it up. Why did he assume that the celestial bodies move in circles? Based on sacred geometry, because the Greeks thought that circles were the perfect shape and what else would a perfect God put in heavens? There was no theory of why the planets move at all, no theory of gravity, no theory of inertia. All they had was aesthetics and gut feelings.

But guess what? When science is actually the weakest tool that you have at your disposal and doesn’t really tell you anything, you need to use guesswork and gut feelings and aesthetics and make shit up, throw it at the wall and see what sticks. You need to watch apples fall, and ask why. You need to throw a ball in the air, observe the curve it makes, and make lots of guesswork regarding why it goes up, then slows down, and then accelerates again falling down. Then you need to say “Wow, what if a cannonball does exactly the same thing, only too fast to see? And the faster you launch it, the flatter the curve. What if you launched it fast enough that the the curvature of its descent matched the curvature of the Earth? And what if the Moon does the same thing, falling around the Earth forever, following the curvature of the Earth? And what if all the planets do the same around the Sun?”

What is absolutely guaranteed to lead you nowhere, is skepticism. With skepticism, you will simply reject everything that doesn’t support your preconceived notions and you will remain a happy douchebag, convinced that you are on the right side of science and knowledge. And the worst possible thing you can do is trust yourself and your own observations, and be skeptical of everything else, because you are most likely just not smart enough. The path to not being a stupid fool is not called skepticism, it’s called faith. You need to have faith in order to go to school and learn things. You need to have faith in order to actually bother with science. You need to have faith in order to persevere throughout your difficult times and ignorance and inability to personally test and verify things. But eventually, if you had enough faith and confidence and perseverance, you do get to be smart enough to personally verify and test things. You do get to be smart enough to be able to know, and then you no longer need faith, because now you have knowledge. Just don’t forget that knowledge didn’t get you there. You got there through faith, because you walked the path without seeing the goal, and you put your trust in the words of others and in the sign posts. If you were skeptical, you’d have failed. If you had doubts, they’d have sapped your will to persevere throughout difficulties. If you listened to the voice of reason, it would have told you to quit on the 90% of the way because you invested all that effort and you still can’t see the goal and you still can’t verify that you made the right choice to have faith.

The scientists (as in “adherents of scientism”, not “practitioners of scientific method”) usually divide the world into two parts: science and bullshit. They always did, even at the early times of science, when it didn’t really explain much of the world, and when such sentiment was mere faith. However, I see things differently. I divide the world into the part for which we have reasonably convincing explanations, the part that we know is bullshit and falsehood, and the part of which we are ignorant, of which we have no knowledge or explanations. For instance, up until recently we didn’t have any knowledge of what Pluto’s surface looks like. It was a blurry dot. Now we know it looks like this:

But it looked like this even when we didn’t know it. It looked like this even when we didn’t know Pluto existed. What does Eris look like? What do Haumea and Makemake look like? That’s the part we don’t know, and the good thing is that we know that we don’t know. What is it that we think we know, and we actually don’t? That’s the part where we would normally react with skepticism to defend what we think we know, but we should be highly skeptical of our motivations in doing so, and we should be especially skeptical of our skepticism, because it might well be the result of our ignorance reacting in self-defense.

We might look at the flat-earthers and the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and see them as pathetic figures, but I see them as something more sinister. I see them as victims of that same vile beast of skepticism that threatens to eat us all if we allow it to roam unchained. You see, skepticism is not what made Yuri Gagarin climb into that capsule on top of that rocket. Skepticism would have told him there was no reason to believe he would succeed, and, even more importantly, that he wouldn’t die. Nobody did it before and therefore there was no evidence that it could be done. But he had faith, and he had courage, and he had trust, and he had confidence.

And when I see “skeptics”, atheists, materialists and scientists of all kinds, in their arrogant mockery of faith, I want to stomp their smug faces into the ground, because if it were left to the likes of them, we’d still be living on trees and in caves. The likes of them ridiculed the first ape-man who used fire to roast his meat, they ridiculed the first ape-man who used a fire-hardened spear to hunt, they ridiculed the first woman who planted seeds into the ground to grow more instead of eating them. They are fucking idiots, and if it were left to them, only evil, ignorance and darkness would rule in this world, and all light and beauty would have been extinguished before it had a chance to show its potential.