but when it doesn't, when stupidity is harmless, it's harmless.
Stupidity is never harmless, even if the only victim is the person behaving stupidly.
I wouldn't attempt to persuade someone like Johnathan Segovia, for instance, who is a nice guy and doesn't do bad shit, who is a christian and isn't causing any harm by it, I wouldn't tell him that his faith is dumb and that he should only accept things with empirical evidence.
Then that is a difference between you and I.
Perhaps I might not use the word 'dumb'; 'unfounded' is much better. But the fact is that decisions get made while under the impression that false things are true, and that has repercussions.
There is no way to soften the blow of the word 'ignorance'; there's simply too much emotional baggage attached to that word.
And yet, it's the only one that applies here; religious faith is willful ignorance
by definition, and refusing to take a stand against it--especially when it
DOES affect one's own life, even if one has rejected it, by virtue of the behavior of others towards oneself--is simply unconscionable.
Right now, my life is made palpably worse by people who make truth assertions and political decisions based on
faith; the term "faith-based initiative" ought to ring a bell or two.
And to quote Sam Harris, no society has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable; the combination of skeptical inquiry and reason is A Good Thing™...faith is not. That anyone could argue otherwise is, frankly, incomprehensible to me.
My point is that in day-to-day life, it doesn't make any sense to only believe things founded with definite, empirical evidence all the time.
There is a huge difference between taking an intuitive leap or a risk, and positively asserting--even basing one's entire life on the idea--that something is true despite insufficient evidence.
