Blasphemy and Social Engineering

Are you offended by something I said? Well, I'm not the manager of your feelings. You own your feelings. If you are like most people, you choose how you react to any situation based on how you were taught to react, you are not inescapably destined to be offended by what anyone says. If someone could literally force you to feel a certain way against your will, they would be able to inflict physical pain by whispering in your ear.

There are rare cases where people have neuronal connections in their brains that allow them to physically feel visual stimulation, but not the pain of staring into the sun or listening up close to a jet engine. Some people experience physical sensations from seeing certain colors. But this topic is about how you learned to behave in response to the behavior of other people.

If you find any message, symbol, sign, emblem, adornment, etc., offensive enough to drive you and your group into a frenzy of protests and effigy burning, you should question why you feel that way about it. More importantly, you should ask yourself who taught you to feel that way and what is the real purpose behind making you feel offended by something that is completely harmless?

Then there is real hate speech. Hate speech is defined as any communication that targets individuals or groups for unwarranted social status degradation. First we must define what is warranted social status degradation. The only individual or group that deserves social degradation are those that willfully harm individuals, groups, cultures or the ecosystems wherein they reside, through the commission of deception, cruelty, or deprivation of resources.

Take Chic-fil-A and the Boy Scouts of America, for example. Chic-fil-A is against gay marriage and the Boy Scouts refuses membership to anyone gay. Their decisions are based on the belief that homosexuality is a choice. Both organizations endorse targeting gays for social status degradation by virtue of the methods by which they draw their conclusions.  The idea that homosexuality is a choice comes purely from conclusions based on misguided conjecture without any effort at scientific inquiry. Organizations that base their conclusions on conjecture and choose to discriminate based on those conclusions have no place in civilized society and must be removed.

All beliefs arrived at without supporting evidence or facts require faith. Faith is a word that denotes conjecture, therefore faith is for fools.