darkSpyro

Yes, I know there have been a lot of serious, deep, thought-provoking topics recently, but I just want to discuss one issue that concerns me greatly: the way society shelters itself.

Whenever new ideas and theories come to mind, there is always a group/individual that has to be offended by it. This isn't a big deal, but I believe it happens way too much today, especially in our political and educational structure. For example, in one middle school in Texas, USA, a teacher put on a quiz for her students a question that read, "There is a God," and the students had to mark it as a fact, commonplace assertion, or opinion. The correct answer was opinion, and that made many parents and students furious. I do not mean to offend anyone, but believing a higher being exists is an opinion, unless you have solid evidence, which no religion really does at the moment. Theories are widely held opinions, so the god theory is an opinion, as the big bang theory is.

When people deny approaches with very factual/legitimate evidence, we are only stopping human progress. People often forget about Medieval Times, or the Middle Ages, or the Dark ages, whatever you would like to call it. During this time period, a lot of human knowledge through textbooks and documents were removed by the Catholic Church to make people more ignorant and to have no choice but to follow the church. A similar situation occurred with the rule of Chin Shi Huangdi in China, with the burning of textbooks to make people follow him. When we stop knowledge from being spread across our culture and society, we are stopping ourselves from getting ahead in human advance. We could possibly be in the age of technology now that we will two centuries ahead if it were not for the Dark Ages.

Also, people let their opinions and biases seep into science and moral facts a lot of the time. Racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, xenophobia, and many other types of prejudices still exist in our society today. In USA, segregation was abolished in 1964, but we still have many racial intolerant people who exist in the USA. Now, I know it will take a long time for everybody to get used to being desegregated, but it is not hard to provoke yourself from saying racial slurs or segregating yourself from others based on their race. It has been shown in science that humans tend to like people who look similar to them, but that gives us no reason to hate others based on the amount of melanin in their skin. People let their prejudices slip into politics way too much in our society. For example, once again speaking of the USA, there has never been an openly atheist president. Atheists always get shot down by the republican and democratic parties, as well as even from local government. I'm not saying every atheist politician is a good politician, but I am saying that we need to focus on what the politician is trying to help here and now, not where he or she believes he or she will go after death. Letting our biases slip into an advancement is almost like poisoning ourselves.

Society does advance all the time, but it could a lot more if we just learned to love each other and to coexist with those we do not agree with. We should not push theories and politicians out of our view because we do not like something about their/its appearance or how they/it appear to us. We need to look at the core of the problem and allow those who are willing to solve it take initiative. We should try our best to free ourselves from our biases so we can do better for future generations and the survival, satisfaction, and progress of humanity. We are only stopping ourselves.

The journey of a million miles begins with a single step.

You've just taken it.

Fog of illusion, Persona 4, you guys know who I'm gonna quote so I'm not spoiling.

Some people are going to root themselves in ignorance for their whole lives though. It's easy to be apathetic to the world, selfish, live and die affecting pretty much nothing and just overall having a sad existence. Why? Because it's easy for them, and they would gladly accept someone carry them through life to make ir even easier. It's why so many join cults that tell you everything and how you should act, dress, be; or why they eat up media and repeat it like parrots. It's hard to think and want to be something more, it's easy to just be a number and never worry about anything that's not your job or what to eat for dinner.

Also tied to prejudice, safe spaces, fearing change(don't mean "wah they changed the look of the game", I mean straight up some people can't take a new neighbor moving in). If someone makes them think in another perspective, they'll suffer. Better never learn it exists and just shut down the opposition before they get you.