Our Greatest Delusion As Humans - Veritasium has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine on that post.

Yeah...I find the nihilism bit more debilitating than the delusion bit. I find it too overwhelming to make a choice about where to invest my precious time when I am quite so aware that it is so utterly finite. It might help to have a glimpse of the your future (or lack thereof) rushing up to meet you occasionally, but truthfully I am happier person when it is not dominating my thoughts and I have space in my head to laugh and love and other words beginning with l (or not).

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

People who don't entertain this delusion suffer from depressive realism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
It's a burden.

So I guess people like Rosa Parks were also tools? Perhaps Alice Paul was a tool for standing up for the rights of women to vote? I suppose Mahatma Gandhi was a tool for resisting British oppression and rule?

This is what you cannot seem to grasp, although I will try in the most basic method to explain it to you. Rights = GOOD, Oppression = BAD. Now, what does this mean? It means you have rights that are expected to be yours in a civilized society.

For instance, lets say you were Hispanic and in Arizona. Due to the fact that the Supreme Court allowed portions of SB1070, the 'paper's, please' law to remain in effect, you can be forced as a Hispanic to provide clear proof that you are a citizen in any situation as long as the officer has a reason to suspect that you might be an illegal immigrant.

The reasonable suspicion is entirely at the discretion of the officer, an individual who is not in any way psychic or specifically trained to spot 'illegal immigrants'. So let's say you are wearing a shirt that says Viva La Raza, just a saying that means you are proud of your race. If I was an officer, I could claim that you wearing a shirt with Spanish on it and being Hispanic could mean that you are illegally here. Ludicrous, I know, but I could claim it and get away with it the way the law is worded. I could stop you in the middle of the sidewalk, force you to submit to an ID request, and question you at the bare minimum. I could say a bulge in your pocket looked like drug paraphernalia and that you smelled of drugs, leading to a body search.

Now let me ask you, even if you were perfectly innocent, had no drugs, were not illegal, and were minding your own business, would this not piss you off? Assuming it didn't that one time, would you get pissed off when it happened over and over?

Look, I'm Caucasian and a male, and even I know that stuff like this is horseshit. At a certain point, if you don't stand up or support the ones who do, then when they come for you there won't be anyone left to help.

If you can't get the point and still feel the way you say, I feel sorry for you. Thankfully others do and even though you think they are tools, they will take the fall so you can continue to live your delusions.

You make words like caveman!

YOU are the one being asinineningly stupid with ideologically rigid statements that simply do not match historical fact. I don't consider governmental involvement in society inherently good or bad. It can hurt; it can help. I never claimed any utopia whenever government gets involved. There are no easy answers. You said the private sector is ALWAYS better. That is absolutely ridiculous, and easily refutable.

You just said before that if you are dependent on government, than you have no self pride, and weren't brought up well. So I blew that idiotic argument out of the water by simply proving how you are dependent on government. Now you change your thesis to this chestnut - it's only good for government to do anything if it corrects a horrific problem within the private sector.

And this is also total utter complete bullcrap.

Tell me - what change in the last 150 years made the biggest change in literacy rates in the US? Compulsory education laws in conjunction with the formation of the public school system. Absolutely, without question, this is the case. You can complain all you want about the public school system today, but there is no denying the impact they had on making society more skilled and knowledgeable, and they were governmental institutions by enlarge, and still are today. This came about during the banning of child labor, but it goes well beyond outlawing gross negligence in the private sector, yet, it was absolutely a big net positive for society.

See? It's really not hard to find examples to kill delusions formed by ideological rigidness. You just have to not be so insanely blind, that you miss obvious historical examples of these kinds of things.

And once again, I NEVER said governmental intervention is always good. You however DID say that private sector solutions are always better, when they clearly aren't always better, and that anyone who depends on the government for anything lacks self pride.

And you're dead wrong. Even your analysis of the ACA is idiotic. If Obamacare is government overreach, and government overreach is what causes prices to go up, why then did cost increases slow as ACA came online? Why do so many countries with larger government overreach in the form of universal single payer health care have lower costs than we do? Mind you that I am NOT saying their health systems are better, but it's an absolute fact they cost less than ours.

You're full of crap!

You rely on the government for national defense, you idiot. You know why? Because in the real world you can't defend yourself from foreign armies and terrorists. You depend upon the police for protection no matter how many guns you might have.

Where the disconnect here is the idiotic notion that we don't need government for things like health care regulation. The reality is ACA didn't just come out of the blue. It came from an obvious systemic problem within the overwhelmingly market controlled system.

You can keep mindlessly babbling all you want that government intervention is always bad, but that is turning an idiotically blind eye to basic US history, where there are ridiculous number of examples the government getting involved to effectively regulate industries are undeniably good, like the Meat Inspection Act, Food and Drug Administration, making it illegal to put lead in paint, regulations for car safety, regulations on buildings so you can't for example put asbestos in the walls, requiring labels on food so you know what ingredients are in them, so you could avoid nuts if you have a deadly nut allergy.

You know why? Because, despite your delusions, you can't inspect all your food, wear a mask when you walk into every building you go into to protect from asbestos, know that the tires you are buying don't have an excessively high chance of blowing off your car and killing you, ensure the air you breathe doesn't have too much lead in it, etc. etc. etc.

You're dependent on the government for all that, and it has massively improved your quality of life, and it has nothing to do with your self pride or dignity, so cut the utter bullcrap.

Hi RFlagg. God has given evidence of His existence through the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, by raising Him from the dead. You’re right, you could have a supernatural experience in any religion, because the devil is the god of every false religion and he can give signs too. He has never raised a man from the dead, however, neither did he ever pay for the worlds sins, yours and mine.

God revealed Himself to man from the very beginning. Everyone from the beginning knew who God was, but gradually the knowledge of God faded away as men chose to turn away and follow after their own ways. Therefore, God raised up a people for Himself who would prepare the way for His Messiah.

Darren brown doesn’t know that you have an enemy of your soul who is trying to destroy you. You seem to be saying that supernatural experiences are a phenomena of human consciousness rather than from an external power. But there is an intelligence behind those experiences; they aren't merely delusions in and of themselves. There is also a manipulative hand seeking to influence how you see those experiences.

You mentioned that you were a former Christian, and this is what you listed: you watched TBN, foxnews and voted republican. I hope you know that none of those things makes you a Christian. Jesus talks about true and false Christians; what makes you believe you ever really were a Christian? Going to church? Praying? Reading the bible? None of those things makes you a Christian either. If you never really were a Christian, you should know from the bible that you are unable to tell the difference between Christianity and any other religion without Gods help. He has to open your eyes because right now you are dead in trespasses and sins. Jesus Christ didn't come to make bad people good, He came to make dead people alive.

Hmm... in that case their optimism seems more like delusion.

No, absolutely not - if he is right about his atheism, it is surely joyous and enviable that he lived his life free from delusion? And sad that billions live and have lived subject to the whim of clever con artists preying on the easily misled. If - as you say - he is right about his atheism.

LOOK! Another cry of racism from someone who has never actually encountered true racism or would even know how to identify 'racism' should they actually ever encounter it! Can you say, "duped by an overdose of mass-media histrionics?" That's right consumers of mass-media, take the race-bait and feed your own delusions!

there are a few inaccuracies in this video but over-all..makes a pretty strong point.
our fore-fathers did not exactly agree on the size,powers and authority the federal government should have,quite the opposite see:the federalist papers.

so the statement that the original intent was for a small centralized government is inaccurate.

but the argument over the bill of rights is fairly accurate.
hence the terms "inalienable and god-given".

i think the term indoctrination is used appropriately here.
2nd graders should not be introduced to such ideologies and most certainly not in this fashion.get em while they are young!..reprehensible.

this is ideology vs reality.
this is power vs powerlessness.
this is power abusing young minds to create a submissive and unquestioning attitude towards authority.

while the ideology may be comforting and even noble..it is a delusion when compared to the reality.

a citizen must KNOW their rights in order to fight for them.because power will ALWAYS attempt to curb or outright take those rights away and if they are able to do that (and they HAVE in many cases) then those rights are..in fact..privileges.

the "free speech zones" example is perfect.that was from st louis RNC in 2004 (i think..im recalling from memory).see? they didnt "take" away your right to free speech,they just made you do it -------> over there.

which affectively neutralized any dissent,but hey..you still had your right to free speech,just neutered and ineffectual.

to even call this educational is an insult to teachers.
its indoctrination..pure and simple.

This is a waste of time I'm sure, because you seem pretty tunnel visioned @shinyblurry, but you're not bringing a Christian voice or viewpoint, you're bringing YOUR Christian voice and viewpoint. It's not necessarily the voice or viewpoint of all Christians. You need to get over yourself and whatever delusion you have that you are Christ's representative here. There are a lot of atheists here. I'm not one of them. I'm also Christian (albeit a terrible one I suppose). There are other religious people on the Sift as well. Yet, somehow, I'm able to cope with reality and science etc and not feel like it's my mission to come in here and tell all the heathens the evil of their ways. Shit, I'm probably more a sinner than all of them. In any event, my point is, this is what you do all the time, every time. Every fucking comment. Give it a rest. This is why you're having a hard time here. For fucks sake, I like a pointless internet argument as much as anyone else but can't you take a little time and have some fun here once in awhile too? Or at least talk about something else.

You may think that, I think in most instances it's neither only stupidity nor solely delusion, but it can be just complete ignorance. I point to miracle surgeons in South America that convince uneducated people that they can reach inside their body and pull out organs. They believe it because they don't know better and they're delusional usually. If they knew basic physiology, it would be much harder for them to delude themselves.
As to 'Another language, I can speak that.', I point to Peggy Hill (and those real people like her). With her, it's ignorance of the subject paired with ignorance of her own ability, at least as I see it.
I have actually known people who said things like 'calculus, probably something I can just do.' that quickly dropped AP calculus when they learned differently. They were completely ignorant of what it was, or the base math knowledge needed to learn it and maybe deluded about their own skills. When the ignorance was cleared up, the delusion evaporated.
My point is, delusion is far more difficult if not impossible without ignorance.
EDIT: please see above for how I see dumb and stupid as different.

What? That's not stupidity, that's delusion. I've known some people who are really stupid, but they're still not gonna go "Japanese? Yeah, I guess I could speak that... Calculus? Probably something I know how to do." There are some really dumb, incompetent, humble people out there, who assume they can't do much of anything, and some smart, overconfident people who think that whatever other people are good at, is probably easy. It's not related to their level of competence, but to whatever bullshit the world has told them about their own relative ability.

...the basic flaw of bad loud liars is that not only are they incapable of the critical thinking process and are then unmindful of that capability in others. Case in point...the successive timeline of It perpetrating that which it attempts to lay at others feet is Its own pathetic pathological pattern.

That others have no more interest in bothering to glean such no more than they would to follow the canine scatological trail of a poor neighbor doesn't provide grounds for Its delusions that It is believed by anyone here.

But, "Little...thing," I have a record of the pattern and...wait for it...past being merely tired of you and your abusive presence here.