They are handy when you need help with stuff, from jumping your car to maybe sharing resources in a collapsing nation.

I'm growing out of being too much of a cynical smartass about it, can't change minds that way - but cathartically I don't regret much of it. From as mild as "is it natural? Yes, and . . . I have some very radioactive radium, which I promise is at least as natural". To things that took more effort, like when I made the Homeopathic Uranium preparation. Going absolutely by the official book in how I made it - actually, here - perhaps it will give a chuckle: [sites.google.com]

@Observer-Effect holy shit, that was great and terrible at the same time.

@Amzungu2 Thank you Ma'am! Yeah it was. My ex-wife and her family got super into Homeopathy, and at one point my son had an eye infection. And they were trying homeopathic drops for it, and they didn't work. I found out, I'm prone to them too - I got him antibiotic eyedrops, and the problem started clearing up in a day. And what had just been annoying, "sure, Arnica will make it feel better" siliness - suddenly became war for me.

The uranium homeopathic solution was fun because I could drink jars of it safely, because at the dilutions they go to - there is at least as much uranium in your spring water. So it was to teach something, and to mock them.

Yeah, the groupy syndrome comes to mind. This group, that group, what group you from? Ummm a human one? Seems to squeeze everyone into groups that isolate...

@HerbertNewsam Tribalism makes life simpler, no need to struggle with decisions. Its like religion, I've read thousands of books and still don't know all the answers. A theist can read just one book and know it all!

@Observer-Effect family groups were hugely important against predators, that extension has been highly used as control. " blessing or curse" ? The religionist has both blessing and curse.....

@Observer-Effect what? Where did you get it from that someone can know it all?

@Jolanta Where? From the distant land of classic figurative sayings!

I agree, its not my business - unless folks who believe in Armageddon work in missile silos, or anti-science people are gutting our health infrastructure, religious people are involved in passing laws that govern me. Etc, that's the problem, they don't keep it to themselves.

Its like the drug house down the street from me, selling heroin or speed or something. But the constant stream of visitors and other behavior make it pretty clear. I never paid much attention to it, or reported anything I saw, figuring they can put whatever crap into their own bodies they want to. Until one day there was gunfire there, with a bullet hitting a house next to me. Now, it is my business - and I am now a narc.

I've long dismissed superstitious/pseudoscience idiocy, mostly getting sucked into arguments now and then because of my own ego. But now I believe its a clear and present danger, and quickly killing people right in front of us. And, religion has done this in history before - and people have stood up to it before too.

@Observer-Effect I think it’s easy to differentiate the harmless from the malignant.

@Gatovicolo Well, I think one can be disguised as the other, but then . . . perhaps I'm simply cognitively not nimble enough to always easily differentiate between them.

@Observer-Effect I suppose it can, but phrenology vs TDS seems very easy.

@JohnnyQB My insurance lady says we just do not know what to believe anymore. I find this strange because I had no problems until the last presidential election.

Swap them for this little video:

@Observer-Effect I should

@Heidi68 I've watched that video twenty times and it still kills me! That dude is the richest preacher in history. Nearly a billionaire. He is the one who told his flock he had to buy private jets because he can't be in an airplane with "demons". But not only is he a huge scam artist . . . look at the guy, he looks like a demon! What really bothers me about him, isn't really him, disgusting scammers have always existed. But it really bothers me that he has millions of followers. Terrifying.

@NotReligious71

I have a long history of watching and hating "Dr" Dobson and his Focus on the Family franchise. I was living on the front range of Colorado when they moved their operation to Colorado Springs. C.Springs, like most of Colorado, had been an area long dancing between right wing and progressive extremes for a long time. But FOF moving its thousands of employees to the Springs completely pushed it over the edge into libertarian/right-wing territory.

And then I worked in radio and print media for years, and Focus on the Family has their fingers in so many areas that you can't help but run across their work constantly. Awful people, completely misogynistic, superstitious fascists.

Yep, this article really spoke eloquently about that.

[eand.co]

A good section from it:

But the really strange, bizarre, and weird thing isn’t all that — ignorance has always been around, hasn’t it? It’s that today, ignorance is willful. Deliberate. Proud. Boastful, cocky, and exultant. Pompous, high-sounding, and aggrandizing. It waves banners and sings chants and discusses philosophies. Ignorance today thinks of itself as Aristotle by way of Descartes and Kant. The really strange thing about now is that ignorance parades itself as enlightenment.

Ignorance — of every kind, day after day. That’s bad enough. But ignorance proudly presenting itself as wisdom, truth, and enlightenment? In bestsellers, through YouTube “personalities”, by college professors? Now that’s tragedy and comedy both. And yet people buy it. Why? I think this weird phenomenon — of flaunting ignorance as grand-sounding enlightenment — is made of a fatal cocktail of cognitive dissonance, infantile regression, and malignant narcissism.

Yeah, I just got booted from FB for a month. It was because of a picture of starving kids in Africa with a note about how well prayer seems to be working. And somebody claimed that there was nudity. There is a shadow in the clothes of a kid thats squatting, where if you are really determined to imagine genitalia you could, but just as easily could see a car or a piano -- just like looking at clouds. It was pretty clear it religiously offended somebody.

I have tried over the last few years to mellow out my vehemence towards religion and crap like homeopathy. But now I'm getting really outwardly angry, because though religion and pseudoscience are not responsible for Covid - they are the primary tools that have been used to disassociate Americans with medicine and science. If we didn't live in such a stupid fucking superstitious/religious nation? We'd have Covid under much more control now. Religion is evil.

Sounds kinda like what happened in Kentucky several years ago. While growing up in the late 50s/60s, Kentucky was a Democratic State. Happy Chandler, Bert Combs, Wendell Ford, Julian Carroll, John Y. Brown, Martha Layne Collins, Paul Patton, all great Governors, and then came Senator McConnell, Republican, and more and more GOP influence throughout the state. Since Mitch, it's a toss-up as to how the state will go. Trump did get trumped in his support of Bevins in his run for re-election and was beat out by Dem. Andy Beshear for the Governor's seat. Yea! Larry in western Kentucky

@Observer-Effect -I whole heartedly agree!!!! EVIL in the White House!!!!

NotReligious71 I don't make a practice of giving family members a special pass, family members often assume they can get away with more because they rely on others to be society rule followers, and in my case, they found out otherwise.