Advocating Reality

"You can't solve a mystery with another mystery." - Matt Dillahunty, The Atheist Experience I see it time and time again, when theists get backed into a corner, they often resort to a 'Mysterious Ways' argument, or they appeal to 'The Unknown' to account for their unreasonable beliefs.  It's weak, but they use it anyway. This is, of course, not acceptable in the slightest.  If mankind has no actual knowledge about something, why choose to believe the most plausible-sounding lie? For starters, many people are indoctrinated from a very young age to accept authority for authority's sake; but I think that the problem is much deeper than this.  It seems like we want to find answers, but for some reason many of us don't care whether or not those answers are correct.  When you watch or listen to a few debates/arguments between theists and atheists, you find very quickly that 'I don't know' is an unacceptable answer to most theists. ...

My friend Wayne made a post on his Facebook Wall earlier today: Everyone should dedicate one hour to education per day. Yea, go do something useful. Now, I actually do this already.  I am always looking for documentaries, lectures, debates and whatnot in order to further my understanding of science and of the world in general.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is something that everyone should do.  I realize that many people have little free time in their lives, but I say do it anyway.  Learning is the absolute best use of your time, in my opinion, and it has innumerable benefits. For one thing, learning will  challenge your preconceptions.  I can't count how many times I have watched Lawrence Krauss' lecture 'A Universe From Nothing', because it completely changed my perspective on how the Universe actually works.  This has happened to me on a number of occasions, on such topics as cosmology, biology, chemistry, and physics...