Irrationalities

Here are some of the many things about other people I don’t understand:

1. I hear people – mostly Christians, from what I can tell – talking about religious freedom. But as far as I can tell, they are the only ones who want to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. What’s the rationale? Wasn’t the separation of church and state a principle designed to protect people from different philosophical orientations from being dominated by any nationally ordained philosophy?

2. Why do the same people who believe that abortion is murder support unrestricted gun ownership, including assault weapons, and the death penalty? I can understand an objection to abortion, although I don’t see how small government claims the right to regulate what goes on inside a woman’s body. But I can’t understand people who believe in the sanctity of life believing that they should be armed to the teeth against those with whom they disagree.

3. Why do smokers not seem to recognize that throwing cigarette butts on the street is littering? And why don’t they get tickets for it?

4. Why do progressives not understand the alarm bells (irrational as they may be) that go off in conservatives’ heads when they hear the word “socialist?”

5. And why are those anti-socialist conservatives unable to distinguish between socialism, which is really about mutual interdependence, with fascist communism, where an autocratic leader controls all the mechanisms of production and is not accountable to the people? Churches are socialist – they pool money for the good of their communities. Medicare is socialist. The construction of roads; investments in research to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and military support are all socialist inasmuch as they’re collective investments in what has been deemed the good of the broader community.