I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Well, the central argument of the video is that life without God is meaningless. You've already agreed with that point, so the argument now seems to be is whether someone can be happy and fulfilled with a meaningless life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't believers who died happily in ignorance of the truth, but the question is, did they understand that their life was meaningless? I doubt it. It is not something that many people are able to face, and even if they could, they certainly don't live that way. In some way or another, they are deluding themselves and living as if their life does have meaning.

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

Hope is what keeps people going. Without hope, you are just going through the motions. When you have hope and lose it, it is emotionally devastating. A person without any hope is a person most likely clinically depressed.

You can call depression a kind of mental disorder, and some people may be born without the right chemical receptors for instance, but most people are depressed because of a lack of hope. A person, for instance, who worked their whole life and lost their retirement in an afternoon, or a mom whose kids abandoned her to live in a nursing home. They are not mentally ill, they are simply facing the cold, stark reality of their situation.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

The point being, that if there is no God then no one is in the drivers seat here on planet Earth. I would be surprised if the extreme fragility of our civilization escaped you. If you look at history, and you contrast it to what is going on today, you will find that the new is simply the old in different packaging. We're watching the exact same game show, simply on a grander and more dangerous scale. Humanity has never been closer to utterly destroying itself anytime in its history than it is today. I'm sure, like everything else in creation, you will attribute that to dumb luck. However, if you think everything is a numbers game, then sooner or later the odds say that cooler heads will not prevail and there will be a civilization annihilating calamity. The truth is, it is only the sovereign hand of God that is restraining this from happening.

The reason I made that comment about God is because of your comment about your depression. The reason you have that feeling that if you believed in God you wouldn't be depressed is because you know there is hope in God.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/29/half-german-teens-dont-know-hitler-dictator_n_163659 3.html

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Thanks for the elaboration. I am familiar with the philosophy of Sam Harris, and I figured you were borrowing from him, but it is good to know where you stand. My original point, however, still stands. You say you can't imagine someone finding bliss in hurting people. Well, have you ever heard of psychopaths? They do indeed find their bliss in acquiring power and control and making other people miserable, and they feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

You also say that you feel the best state of a human being is to be blissfully happy. I'm sure everyone will agree with you that feeling blissfully happy is good. However, why should we believe this is actually what good is?. Yes, it feels good to feel good, but this doesn't tell us why we *ought* to do anything. Maybe this is just incredibly selfish and the opposite of good, or somewhere in the middle is true, or maybe none of it. You give no actual reason (beyond arbitrary statements like that which makes the world better or worse) to equate feeling good with moral goodness. In a meaningless Universe, neither is there any basis for thinking that you have any moral duties. This leads me to some questions that you didn't actually address in the last post. Let me ask them again because they are central to this discussion:

In a meaningless Universe there is no actual right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe really exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

I'll also address some of your comments:

In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion

People do evil because they get carried away by their lusts and become enticed. You view this as some sort of ignorance, or automatic function. Not so. When a person is doing wrong, they are almost always entirely aware of this, but simply override their moral restraints with their desire to fulfill their lusts. People are responsible for the evil that they do, not society, environmental factors, their parents, or anything else.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

I've already agreed with you that we all have a God given conscience that tells us right from wrong. Therefore, we don't need to read the bible to know that it is wrong to murder or steal. However, what God has commanded is that we all repent and believe in the gospel. This is something you aren't going to intuitively understand without being told.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

I am familiar with his system, to which I reiterate the point; what is the ground for associating moral evil with misery and moral good with "moving people away from misery". Where do you get moral duties in a meaningless Universe?

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too.

The morality that God gives can be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind and all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself. As Jesus told us:

Matthew 22:40

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments

That's a very simple system. When you love God and other people everything else follows naturally.

Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

On the contrary, it's all arbitrary, because "what makes things better for people" or what "makes the world worse" is something determined by consensus. If everyone in the world agreed that torturing babies for fun made things better for people, it would be good in your view. If your moral system allows for this possibility, I think that's a sign its time to throw it away.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

If this were true, there would be no need for courts, judges, prisons, or police officers. There are also laws which may make some people miserable but are necessary for the greater good.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

It doesn't suffice, though. Yes, we can both agree there is a universal morality among human beings. How is that fact supposed to serve as grounds to invent an arbitrary system of good and evil based on people following their bliss and avoiding misery? I could just easily reverse the two and say the existence of universal morality justifies that too. I could say that the existence of a universal morality justifies that we should all love eggplants and hate rutabagas. There is no logical connection here between the system you've created and universal morality.

If there is no objective morality, then nothing is really wrong. Any system you create in the end is a human invention, based on human interpretation, and agreed upon by human consensus. You still cannot get an ought from an is. Good could be defined as a world of people who love each other, or a world of people who love to eat children. What is wrong then is simply based on your personal preferences.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

I understand that this wasn't meant to be perfect. It has, however, raised more concerns than it answered.

>> ^messenger

@shinyblurry

Of what you said above in the first two paragraphs about the consequences of accepting meaninglessness as reality, just about all of it I fully agree with. For clarity, I’ll mark the exceptions:

the closer you are to death the less happy and hopeful you will become
and
Eventually, when enough tragedy happens to you, you will break down and the future will become more and more like a millstone around your neck.

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Further, you comment that, "people become depressed because of a lack of hope."

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

For all of our so-called progress, humanity is just as sick and depraved as it always has been. Evil is increasing, not decreasing, and mankinds destructive appetites will never be satiated. There is no hope in man, but there is in God. I think you know that.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

All that is to say I pretty much agree with your view of what meaninglessness implies, and if there’s any bits that you want to explore more, I’m all for it.

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Lots of people do bad things to others and themselves, and later on, some may consider what they did was bad, or they might not. If they still think it was OK, it’s because they’ve used some kind of justification, like, "She did it to me first," "She was teasing me. What did she think would happen?" or, "He had it coming," or "I had no choice," And so forth. These are all rationalizations after the fact, justifications that allow them to still consider themselves as good people rather than change their behaviour or take responsibility for having done something wrong. These don’t address the real reason these people did these things. In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion.

I believe that the natural and best state for a human being to be is happy (and here again, I mean blissfully happy). Every bit of programming we have nudges us towards certain actions by rewarding us with feelings of happiness, or reduced misery. We only live once, so I would modify your description only slightly to, “taking what bliss you can when you can”.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too. Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

It's been a while since I watched it but I think he lost me at a bit where he concludes that there is no point, therefore the premise of living life as an atheist is false. My own response to this is that there does not need to be a point and, due to the sequential nature of his reasoning, everything that comes after this is flawed because of the false dichotomy. (I was reading the wikipedia list of logical fallacies last week )

>> ^shinyblurry:

Glad that you can see that..you might be the first. What do you specifically disagree on with the first video?
>> ^lampishthing:
Yeah, I don't agree with the first video but, if you take it as a given, what he says here makes sense.>> ^shinyblurry:
In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

Two things come to mind:
1) "Unintended acceleration"---the cognitive panic of someone THINKING they are pressing on the brake as hard as they can when they are actually pressing on the accelerator as hard as they can (well known psychological phenomena known as cognitive dissonance usually follows these episodes---"I cannot have just run over my grandson by pressing as hard as I could on the accelerator so the only possible explanation is that the car ran away and the brakes failed"

or

2) Large floor mats, either after market (to catch rain/snow) or loosened from the floor pan securing pins (cleaning? sloppy?) pin the accelerator to the floor. Spring is too weak to return it---voila. Run away car.

And in their panic, they can't get on the brakes hard enough, because, yes, I believe it's true, there is no production car, assuming a roadworthy state BEFORE such an episode, can "burn out" its brakes or "run away" from a full application of the brake pedal.

Glad that you can see that..you might be the first. What do you specifically disagree on with the first video?

>> ^lampishthing:

Yeah, I don't agree with the first video but, if you take it as a given, what he says here makes sense.>> ^shinyblurry:
In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

Yeah, I don't agree with the first video but, if you take it as a given, what he says here makes sense.>> ^shinyblurry:

In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

no one has really hammered Romney about the Massachusetts health care plan and how he can pass that, yet be against the AHA.

The cognitive dissonance on the right is that large that they won't see the hypocrisy so I just don't see that line of attack convincing a whole heck of a lot of people

>> ^kymbos:

I was trying to think of a reason that it was different from the birth certificate thing. I mean, there are slight differences, but I can't see it as being much different.


Because the Birthers just gave Obama a giant Fuck You card to play at the moment of his choice, which he duly did:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mzJhvC-8E&sns=em

Of course, if he had been Kenyan that would not have demonstrated a moral vacuum (unless you're on the hard right) but it would have shown dishonesty and knocked him out of the race.

So Romney BEING CAUGHT STEALING from his fellow citizens AND LYING ABOUT IT is similar in outcome -if true- but also on a pretty different moral scale IMHO.

Either he plays his Fuck You card or he's out.
Or more likely, the Republican voters will just have to take their world beating cognitive dissonance to an even more cosmic level so they can vote for EXACTLY the kind of royal vulture asshole they complain about ruining their country..

Batshitcrazy psychobabble.

So if a female Muslim decided to be an American Capitalist instead of following the strict and oppressive lifestyle of Islamic society..

In actuality, is she less free?

Sure she's free do whatever she wants: dress the way she likes, socialize with males, choose her own husband, not be subject to abuse and honor-punishments.

But is she truly free? considering that she will no longer be accepted by and free to engage in Islamic society?!

See what i mean?.. psychobabble

>> ^shinyblurry:

In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

In context, it isn't cognitive dissonance. He started off by saying that you have to surrender freedom to the truth to get the deeper and richer freedom. Do you understand what he meant by that? For instance, let's say you decided to be an anarchist and did whatever you wanted instead of following the rule of law. Technically, you are exercising a lot more freedom as an anarchist. You are making your own rules, essentially. However, the truth is that you would actually be much less free, because once you gave up following the rules, you would no longer be accepted in the society. So, although you may be more free when you can do whatever you want, you give up that individual freedom to participate in the society, and that gives you a deeper and richer freedom. Truth can both destroy and liberate freedom. What matters is what we were designed for, what truth we have to surrender to to actually be free, which is what the video is talking about.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

holy shit.
"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.
And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!
You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

holy shit.

"It is true.. that claiming to have the truth is a terrific way to destroy freedom.

And yet, there is a truth that we've gotta have to be free" ?!?!?!

You know what cognitive dissonance is.. right, shiny?

Cognitive dissonance - not just your grandma's psychosis.

Thanks for the promote.


In reply to this comment by enoch:
excuse me for a moment i have to pick up pieces of my brain off the wall.
this boys cognitive dissonance just blew my mind.

excuse me for a moment i have to pick up pieces of my brain off the wall.
this boys cognitive dissonance just blew my mind.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

No death penalty for dogs, but people, well, California might be OK with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_California

Lots of cognitive dissonance going on there.