Inspired by this thread in which hoosier mama laments the ignorance her boyfriend & his belief that the stars are all little planets reflecting light.
When I was in high school (that’s high schoo for you 20 minutes in Mariana’s Trencher’s out there) I remember having a discussion with a classmate about the evolution lecture we had the period before. I recall none of the specifics but I do remember her final assessment: “I don’t know how any educated person could believe any of that evolution crap.”
:eek:
huh?
I had always assumed evolution was what *everyone * believed (and I was raised in a religious household, myself). I thought it was accepted by all…I was at a loss for words and gestures and rational thought. It many ways it was the first time I was faced with evidence that not everyone thinks like I do… :dubious:
At least in my classmate’s case I can say she was not alone in rejecting evolution…but hoosier mama 's boyfriend may have a hard time finding more support for his “stars are planets” theory. So…regardless of your thoughts on evolution, what were your eye openers with people of different opinion (rational or not)?
Well, I have always lived in the Northeastern USA. Mostly in New England, New York and Boston. I am a highly educated professional and hang out with other highly educated professionals.
That said, the idea that adults believe in things like a 5000 year old Earth, spontaneous generation, little pinpricks in the sky or a flat earth are as nonsensical to me as someone believing in Santa Clause or the Toothfairy. That a significant number of people would cling to such ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is an embarassment to me as an American citizen.
I recall reading a survey last year about something or another. One version was taken by Americans, the other by Europeans. A comment was made that some x% of Americans believed in angels while the question was considered to ludicrous to even be included on the European version.
I’m all for intelligent discussion and debate, but I choose not to associate with those who are so closeminded that they cling to beliefs that are unsupportable. If people in the Bible Belt and Deep South want to not be considered backward anachronistic hicks by us Yankees here in the North, I suspect they should stop acting that way.
One that gets me every time is: people who feel that they’re entitled to an opinion on factual matters.
“This bowl is made of plastic.”
“I think it’s made of glass.”
“No, I’m telling you: I read the box, and it’s made of plastic.”
“Well, that’s just your opinion. I think it’s made of glass.”
I remember talking to a cousin about the upcoming 1988 election, asking him who he wanted to win. (Neither of us could vote only being 6 years old at the time.) He said he wanted Bush to win (his mom’s candidate). I knew my mom wanted Dukakis. I figured out at a very young age that it probably wasn’t worth it to get into political discussions with that part of the family.
What always takes me by surprise, anywhere, is the assertion, “(insert your race here) always does this.” Be it any number of racial stereotypes, negative or positive.
“Koreans are always good at math.”
“Asians work really hard.”
“Americans are lazy and don’t know how to find Spain on a map.”
“English are stuck-up, superior, or pompous.”
Um, no they don’t. Even if 97 % of the race does it, there are bound to be people out there who don’t. And there is no way in hell you can judge an entire race. You may as well be judging all of humanity.
And it’s always said with such a superior sort of attitude. Grr.
In a juniour high assignment, we had to try to understand a poem, and take guesses at what the author might have been writing about. The poem, sadly, I have forgotten, but it did go something like: Wearily, I sit/I wipe my brow/I pick up my axe/And start again - something along those lines. The teacher began asking us what we thought it was about. Most of the children said “Lumberjack!” and the teacher favoured them with a big smile and a “Very good!” When she got to me, I said, “What if it’s a guy, sitting in his office? And he’s so tired, and under so much stress, but he took a minute to think about everything, then picked up his pen, which is like his axe, and started writing again?” Heck, to this day I think it sounds like a fair enough interpretation. Isn’t that the idea behind any artform, to figure out what it means to you? The teacher says “Oh, that’s idiotic! How can you not tell it’s a lumberjack! He has an axe! And he’s sweating, too!” And the kids all laughed. Har har.
The most surprising came as an insult from my mother. She’s a devout Catholic, and I was, probably unwisely, questioning her about the Bible, and God, and the like, and when I started asking “forbidden” questions, she threw up her hands and said “We have a theologian who comes in to talk to us during our catechism classes, and he says [whatever it was] is wrong. So you’re wrong.” When I asked her why it was, she says “I don’t know! I’m not a theologian! And neither are you, so shut up about God, since you don’t know anything about Him.” I muttered that I was a theologian of a higher order than the two-bit one brainwashing her in her catchism classes. She told me she trusted her theologian more than she would ever trust me. That shocked me. I’ve always been a good daughter, and this was a slap in the face. I shouted, “So if I was a genuine, certified, theologian, you would trust me again, and you would allow me to brainwash you?” And she retorts in holy indignation: “You’d have to go to school for that!”
Anastasaeon, I’ve had the poetry problem too. Perhaps it’s why i don’t like much poetry to this day, having burned at an early age. Poetry means different things to different readers, or so I always thought.
And if I got started on the religion thing with my mother, we’d be here for weeks.
Oh, and to clarify on my post, since it just looks like more of a couple of anecdotes than directly responding to the OP, the thing that was surprising about these incidents to me was that I thought everyone was interested in seeing things in a new light, in questioning things around them instead of accepting them at face value. le sigh I was so wrong…
Anaamika, I know what you mean about the mother/religion thing - my post was the first of many senselessly vicious arguments. I thank Og for two things: That we now live 3000 miles apart (and get along smashingly) and for the Dope. We may not all think alike, but that’s what keeps pulling me back: new opinions! New ideas! New theories, new thoughts! Yay for evolution! Or maybe yay for Og! Or maybe yay for the Pink Unicorn who watches over us all, and the Sky Pixies! Yay! I have seen the fnords!
That statement brought to mind the old song “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I live in the Bible Belt and Deep South yet I believe in evolution and other liberal positions on abortion, gun control, death penalty, etc. The difference is that I recognize that you cannot pigeon hole people according to their beliefs on one or two subjects. As much as I hate to admit it I also realize that the majority of us that dwell in the middle need those at the extremes to maintain a balance.
I can’t tell whether msmith537 had gotten my blood up enough to deserve a pitting. How elitist and holier-than-thou can you be? Damn. Anachronistic hicks? No wonder Southern types (the majority, not all, 'cause see, I don’t stereotype) vote for people like Bush.
Agh. Anastasaeon, Anaamika, that poetry thing ticks me off to untold heights. I’ve helped friends with poetry papers and they’re so concerned with getting the right answer, that they won’t even contemplate that there’s more than one or that there isn’t an “answer” at all, per se. It’s surprisingly hard to try to convince someone that their interpretation is as correct as another interpretation. I mean, there are interpretations that are more likely and that there’s more support for, but meaning ultimately lies with the reader.
I guess that’s what I can’t understand: people who see only one answer ever. Especially when they can’t respect other answers or conclusions. It’s just so ridiculous. Everything should be open to examination, especially absolutes. There’s something about claiming definitive knowledge in topics where there never can be that annoys me.
Also, people who say, “My <group> doesn’t do this, but your <group> does.” I know someone (who’s a friend now) who, during the election, said something about how Democrats always used dirty politics, but Republicans never did. This resulted in me yelling, “Are you high?!?” and then telling her about dirty politics used by both sides. The conviction with which she said it, as if her politicians were pure as the driven snow, made it seem like wilfull ignorance at the time.
I remember that when I was a little kid, I was completely gobsmacked when I found out that red wasn’t everybody’s favorite color! I mean, how could anyone not recognize its obvious superiority to all other colors?
I keep getting smacked in the face day to day with how different my students’ brains are from mine. This is not too shocking, considering that my brain has been tortured, abused, and beaten into submission by 10 years of training in physics. And also, I was the sort of person who grows up to major in physics, and they were the sort of person who . . . didn’t. But it seems to go much much deeper than that.
E.g. the first: “I don’t like diagrams. Diagrams confuse me. Can you just describe it in words?” Buh??? I’m such a visual thinker, this boggles my mind.
E.g. the second: Electric fields. They can. not. grasp. them. There are lots of concepts that I remember struggling with the first time that I saw them. But electric fields? I remember seeing F=qE and thinking, “Oh, yeah. Okay. That’s obvious. Next!” I don’t want to come off like a smarty-pants, but seriously, I didn’t even bat an eye. But these guys? I can get them to grudgingly draw field lines by rote, and work through the math, but as soon as you probe for any conceptual understanding, you get blank stares. I thought at first that I sucked at a teacher, but I begged my colleagues for help and they said, “If you figure it out how to teach them fields, tell me!”
I worked for a few months as a waitress in a little restaurant before it closed down due to lack of business. When it was busy, it was crazy, but we’d have a lot of slow times in between. One of those days I was standing around after having entered an order in the computer, waiting for a bit before going to check on my table. This one girl I worked with – a few years older than me, probably in her late-ish 20s (she looked young but already had soccer mom hair) was standing around eating a cup of soup because she was pregnant and…well, eating constantly.
This girl was dumber than a box of doorknobs, seriously. Her mom worked there too, and one of the other waiters had gotten her pregnant. Apparently the guy got kicked out of his parents house and had nowhere to go, so they volunteered to let him stay at their house, and one night while he was there somehow he and the daughter ended up in bed together and I guess neither one had the foresight to say “Humm, there might be consequences to this.” He still worked there, too, and there was constantly drama between them.
Anyway, I was talking to one of the other waitstaff about something (probably some news of the day), and somehow mentioned evolution in passing. Doorknob Girl stops eating her soup and looks at me, with this completely shocked expression on her face, and says “You actually believe in that crap?” I was a little caught off guard since she hadn’t been part of the conversation, and looked over and said, “Uh… yeah. What’s wrong with it?” She got a really disgusted look on her face and prattled off something about the Bible and people not coming from monkeys. By that time I could only think of what she’d just said to me, and repeated to her, “You actually believe in that crap?”
She got really indignant and tried to tell me it wasn’t crap, then stormed off in a huff.
I guess it’s OK for her to insult me but not vise versa. Fortunately the restaurant closed down shortly after that and I ended up finding a full-time job elsewhere.
Simply qualifying a statement with “the majority” or “some” does not make it any less a stereotype. What are “people like Bush”? White people? Rich people? Texans?
Now, maybe my mistake was to single out the entire region. I do know that they are not Bible thumping zealots to the last man/woman/child. But my impression from dealing with people from those states is that if you do have more moderate to liberal leanings, you often feel like a minority.
Just because something is a stereotype does not make it untrue. It just means that every member of that group does not necessarily fall under the stereotype.
If I sound elitist, it is not meant to be towards people because they are from a certain region. It is because of they have a way of thinking that I consider closeminded or backward and, right or wrong, I have come to associate that type of thinking with that region.
In any event, I think I’m more inclined to change my view of the Bible Belt than the Bible Belt is inclined to change their view on evolution.
I had a similar experience in high school with one of my friends. I’d first heard the evolution theory when I was 10, so I had long ago accepted it–I’d forgotten that some people take the Bible literally.
RE: Podkayne’s second story–there’s one thing I learned in high school, being the person everyone came to for homework help (at least, until I decided to stop being such a doormat). With everything, there’s people who get it easily and people who don’t. The people who get it don’t understand how the people who don’t get it, well, don’t. I mean, duh, it’s so obvious, how could you not?. And vice versa.
Most people I know are religous in some way not neccescarily Christian or any other organized religion but they atleast believe in God so coming to the SDMB was a shocker being that I never saw so many straight up athiests and then besides this message board I have met a few people who don’t believe in anything and that is always different for me because like I said most people I encounter believe in some type of Higher Power if not God himself.