Originally Posted by elfailo
It would make it a lot more excusable to me in this particular case (presuming it's true). Dumb remarks remain dumb remarks regardless of who makes them, but without any context or history it wouldn't even be possible to tell whether they're dumb (i.e. a product of stupidity) at all.
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I tend to qualify dumb on a statement by statement basis, much easier.
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There's a reason why certain mentally ill criminals (such as schizophrenics acting on hallucinations) get less severe punishments. They're presumed to have been incapable of proper judgment. Picture a guy with a very strong recurring hallucination of his deceased wife telling him that someone he knows is trying to kill her, that he must kill that person to save her, and so he does it. Would that circumstantial fact not alter how you feel about it even the slightest?
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This would make him MORE likely to repeat that, so no, it'd make me more weary of the person in question. As said before, treatment and punishment may differ, but that doesn't make me
sympathetic. Sympathy is about the degree of liking or excusing a person.
NOTHING excuses you from murder. NOTHING.
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It doesn't mean you're justifying the crime. It means you're tempering your own anger, letting a broader understanding of the situation affect how you feel about it. Of course you can still give a guy like that the death penalty though.
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Now that only makes sense if tempering your anger is actually required because you're being irrational about it anyway.
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I posted that video of "gay scientists isolating the Christian gene" some time ago because it's so funny, but I don't even think it's a weird thought at all. Perhaps certain inherent brain qualities make people more or less prone to attribute their experiences to higher powers, be more or less prone to magical thinking or being less discriminate with information, and therefor more vulnerable to religious indoctrination and hogwash like astrology, tarrot cards, palm reading and speaking with ghosts of the dead.
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It's a matter of education and analytical brain development. Someone not having done any developing doesn't make me more sympathetic towards a statement or person who says something.
It's only more likely to make my eyes roll.
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Their beliefs would still be silly, but let's not forget that they're not really their own ideas to begin with.
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And that's the thing. If they can accept someone else's ideas, why would they ONLY be able to accept those specific ideas? There's absolutely no reason to. As I argued earlier, it'd just mean they'd be more receptive to external ideas.
What it is though, is stubborness and denial regarding external input that did not meat the selection criteria. Basically someone selected which sources are trustworthy. Whether this person or someone else, selection criteria are a choice, even if subconscious, even if indoctrinated. If someone is incapable of changing the criteria or looking at their own critically, it doesn't matter if they're smart or dumb: they stick with something and that means they can never have my sympathy on that matter.
Think I said it before, but I built up sympathy regarding a person based on actions, intend and statements, mental capacity (like any other handicap) has nothing to do with that.
Which means I can like very deluded, incapable people for being extremely kind and trying to understand the world they live in, even if they can't. They should at least try if they have even the least bit capacity to and accept they might be wrong.
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You could look at it as a mental virus that feeds on these inherent vulnerabilities, replicates, and then spreads through word of mouth (parroting, everyone does it), the media, books and art. Education is the anti-virus, but sometimes the infection has spread so widely and destroyed so many once healthy faculties that there's really nothing that can be done anymore; the virus has become reality itself. Nothing can slip by it anymore, it consumes everything that tries to fight it, and only becomes stronger through it.
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You could, but education isn't the only anti-body. Your own mind's capacity to think is your first and most important anti-body. If you close of your mind to new input, for whatever reason, there's no way you'll ever receive the education anti-body.
It all starts with resistent cells.