And beliefs in abstracts also inspire people to horrendous acts.

And we are not making things any better by not teaching critical thinking skills in schools. By teaching squishy things, we make squishy people. Squishy has its place, but so does hard. And at the risk of exposing my geek cred here, we are becoming a people of alternate Star Trek universe. Where Captain Kirk couldn’t make any decisions because all that was hard and non squishy had been pulled out of him.

We have to have a balance and more and more we are abdicating our responsibilities in cultivating that balance in our children in favor of the easy route.

It’s well and good to believe that good will always triumph over evil. But without action, it won’t. I’ll throw another quote back at you:

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself – John Stuart Mill

Those ideals are noble and the beliefs worth believing. But without a people possessing the spine to stand up for them, they mean nothing.

Now I get it, I know what they’re saying: People are dumb, panicky animals who would rather worship the fire than learn how exactly it works. But you already know this; you’ve known this for years. To expect people to behave rationally and not ascribe phenomena they don’t fully understand to supernatural entities…Hell, that in itself is quite a leap of faith.

I think Hub from “Secondhand Lions” said it best:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.