The Da Vinci Code - early bird (cheep cheep)

Thanks so much for this video. It is wonderful to hear someone else talk about the nature of belief. I think it helps highlight why it's so important for everyone to get a thorough education in critical thinking at an early age.

Well put,as always. That's why your the Youtube legend. It is frightening,because its that moment in a culture where we are realizing that humans have a very limited capacity to respect people that they significantly disagree with. We're all hoping for the cultural equivalent to something like the Treaty of Versailles. Problem is,you usually have to fight a war before people really acknowledge a treaty's terms. Its the memory of war's devastation which drives that acknowledgement.

I think there are two things going on with that. First, we're all being told now (regardless of how true it is in practice) that we must RESPECT OTHER PEOPLE'S BELIEFS. Which...everyone applies erratically, at best. But at the same time we have a terrible hankering for truth and fact, which is a terrible cognitive dissonance to set up. So you end up with people practicing a kind of weird intellectual dishonesty to get away from the uncomfortable fact that no group of humans is ever going to agree on all the nuances of anything (political belief, religious belief, interpretation of Steven Universe, anything). Which frightens me a bit.

Jill Bearup

I find it hard to measure the "conspiracy threshold" at this point. I got accused of wearing a tin foil hat for saying that some Southern Baptists are anti-gay. Flatearthers live in the same city though,and no one's fitting them for tinfoil head wear. The interesting and possibly dangerous flip side of "everyone wants to be special and woke" is the "all things are equivalent" logic that we see now. The girl complaining about sexism at Starbucks becomes "just as radical" as the guys at the Nazi rally. Maybe this is just the inevitable consequence of democracy. People start to believe that reality itself is a malleable set of conditions that we all vote on.

i am leaning towards Anders above opinion of Sir Ian; he does make everything better. But Da Vinci Code is still mindless garbage in spite of it.

Robert Calhoun

I think the view that Jesus was a normal man might be called Adoptionism and, tbf, it was rejected at the First Council of Nicea. Apparently there were several.

Anders

TBT, I would watch anything with Tom Hanks and Sir Ian McKellen. Together they have enough charisma to carry anything.

Anders

As someone who has been at times actively delusional and full of conspiracy and wild theories of persecution (no the news reader is NOT involved in a conspiracy to feminise the male population, Solomon; and NO she can't see you poke your tongue out at her...) I've become quite intolerant of balderdash by the otherwise privileged sane. So thank you, this was cathartic. But then some delusions can have their charms, with the distance of years. Once upon a time as a patient in a mental hospital, one of the other patients, an old woman said to (/near) me: "Marilyn Monroe is buried under a fountain at Westfields shopping centre." That doesn't seem so far from Mary Magdalene being buried under a statue at the Louvre (or whatever it was), with a certain quaint Australian-ness in the inauspicious resting place for poor Miss Monroe.