Mockery

This post I wrote was deemed (by ongoing vote) the number one best post on the Motley Fool message board system for about four hours yesterday.

The discussion was about a college professor who had ridiculed creationism in private email. Another poster wrote, "Mocking someone else's beliefs is just plain ugly".

I replied:

That is a load of bunk and I will now mock you for having this belief.

(Waggling my finger) Mock, mock, mock.

All beliefs are created equal, but some become harder and harder to maintain with a straight face over time. Anyone in the 21st century who believes, for instance, that the earth is flat, deserves all the ridicule they can be subjected to for this belief. I mock them now.

Mock, mock, mock.

Fundamentalist Muslims believe that women are the property of their husbands and fathers, that they should not be out in public without male escorts and veils, and that they must never speak their mind or contradict their men. For holding those beliefs, I mock fundamentalist Muslims.

Mock, mock, mock.

As recently as 50 years ago, a large number of people in certain areas of this very country believed that blacks were inferior human beings, and that they should not be allowed to sit at the same tables as white people or share the same drinking fountains, and if they tried to marry white women, they deserved to be lynched. Those people were jackasses, and I mock them.

Mock, mock, mock.

You can sit around and come up with rational arguments to use against cretins who believe the holocaust never happened. And you SHOULD be familiar with those arguments, if you want to be solid in the real facts. But at a certain point, you don't legitimize holocaust deniers by giving them equal time in history classes and giving students the opportunity to decide for themselves. You tell them what the best evidence of history points to, and you rightly say that holocaust deniers are morons who have no leg to stand on.

Mock, mock, mock.

Don't get me wrong, I hold that everyone's right to BELIEVE their own ridiculous ideas is sacred, or as close to "sacred" as an atheist can muster. But to tell me that I have no right to POINT OUT that their beliefs really are ridiculous is outrageous. Many ideas are not just stupid, they are downright harmful to a society and the innocent people who live there. And since I do not believe in censorship, the best way to effectively combat these beliefs is to mercilessly mock bad, outmoded, and wrongheaded ideas every chance I get.

Mock, mock, mock.

It is not only GOOD to mock obviously bad ideas for being bad. I argue that it is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to shoot them down whenever possible. Otherwise, ideas that are completely unreasonable start to sound reasonable to an uneducated populace who never learned how to tell the difference between fact and opinion. And the folks who cynically take advantage of other people's bad education to hoodwink them into believing things, so they can steal their money and commandeer their lives, are the lowest scum of the earth. They should be exposed. And then mocked.

Mock, mock, mock.