Conversation is the root of friendship. The capacity to share, to sympathize, and to be a convivial and attentive companion may be a larger part of making friends than things like shared hobbies and opinions. It might be said that shared hobbies and opinions just give you things to talk about!

I am told that I am good conversationalist. I think sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not, but I have had some thoughts about what makes for a good conversation. As I often do, I’ve taken these thoughts and nailed them down for your edification.

These rules apply to one-on-one conversations, dinner parties, phone calls, emails, and instant messenger interactions. And, I should note that they apply to conversations with friends. They are not rules for talking to strangers. I have some rules for that, as well, but they’re a lot shorter: "That stranger probably does not want a conversation with you."

These are not the rules to follow when you need to talk to someone about something specific. They are not the rules you follow when talking to your significant other. They are not the rules you follow when seeking a friendly ear to talk about something that is depressing you, or angering you, or to confess to sins, or whatever.

These are rules for general, light, positive social interaction that serves as the foundation for friendship. These rules make it easier to make friends, and help keep things interesting with your current friends. At least, that has been my experience.

1. If you won’t talk to people, people won’t talk to you.
This is the most important one. Talking to people is intimidating. You don’t want to seem needy. But, you know, everyone craves social contact. If you’re in a room with a friend, they want you to talk to them. They want you to call them, or page them on IM, or send them a friendly text. If you like someone, or find them interesting, go and talk to them. In most cases, they’ll talk back at you and the initial awkwardness about engaging will disappear.

2. Ask questions.
How do you start talking to people? Ask them a question, and keep asking them questions. Start with the superficial, if you like:

“How are you?”
“How’s work?”
“Did you see that movie?”

Then get specific. Ask questions that can’t be answered in a single sentence:

“How did you meet your spouse?”
“Why did you go to school for engineering?”

Most people enjoy talking about themselves. And, asking questions may inspire them to share anecdotes and stories, and so on. They will ask you the same questions. The things they say will fire connections in your memory, inspiring you to witty banter and intelligent commentary.

3. Be positive and enthusiastic.
Tell positive anecdotes, when possible. Ask people questions that make them remember happy things. Tell people positive stories from your job or life. Don’t complain about stupid people all the time. Be enthusiastic about your own topics. I would rather listen to someone speak enthusiastically about mixing paint, than listen to someone speak cynically about supermodels and ninjas.

4. Vent judiciously, if at all.
Don’t complain about your health or finances, at least not immediately. Establish a positive conversation and mutual sympathy, and then, if you have to vent or complain about something, do so judiciously and in small amounts. If you have a concern with someone, talk it out and address it. If you need to get something off your chest, you should, but ideally it should be a concern that specifically relates to the person you’re talking to.

5. Share, then listen.
Once conversation begins, feel free to share anecdotes of your own. Tell anecdotes about things you’ve seen, people you’ve met, and places you’ve gone, but don’t boast about them. If you don’t have any interesting anecdotes, talk about things other people have done. Draw anecdotes from history or fiction, if you have to.

Then shut up and listen to other people.

6. Be aware of your audience.
Listen to people. React to what they say. If they change the subject, go with it. Don’t interject with completely unrelated anecdotes. Be aware of existing prejudices, politics, pet peeves, etc., and avoid triggering them in most social situations.

It is okay to get into a political or religious debate with someone, if they came looking for one. But, be aware that what they are looking for is actually an argument. An argument is not a conversation. Arguments can be stimulating and fun, and they are sometimes essential, but they do not build connections or strengthen friendships.

7. Don’t complain about work.
This deserves its own entry because I see it a lot. Everyone hates their job sometimes. It’s fine to spout off briefly about your boss or coworkers when someone asks, “How’s work?” The key word is “briefly.”

Do not complain about your job for more than a minute or two. Let your friends make sympathetic noises, then move on to something else. Do not list all the absurdities you’ve had to face. Don’t complain about your coworkers or boss. Don’t talk about the stupid task you had to do today, or the annoying phone call you had. Save it for your diary or blog.

You see, we don’t work at your office. We don’t know what a TPS form is. We don’t know who Lydia is. Complaining at length about office politics or procedures will cause every brain in the room to shut off and give you a reputation as a negative person and a bore.

Especially key :
DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR JOB TO PEOPLE WITHOUT JOBS.

Seriously, it’s like going into an amputee ward and telling a legless man how much your feet hurt.

There is an exception to this. You can “talk shop” with people in your industry, and a large part of talking shop is bitching about common frustrations. In this case, you have the sympathy and comprehension of your audience and should feel free to complain as much as you like.

8. Do not complain about money.
See rule #7. Everyone is bad at financial management. We don’t need to hear about your credit card debt or your income. There are exceptions to this. Sometimes the conversation will turn to financial matters, and since everyone has finances, it can be thought of as “talking shop,” and is therefore acceptable as noted in rule #7.

9. Do not be afraid to be ridiculous.
Tell stories that make you look foolish. Be gracious when others do so. Be the butt of jokes. Crack puns. Make ribald comments (in appropriate company). Be whimsical. Do these things judiciously, but do them.

10. Speculate!
Finally, if you really want to get a conversation going, move it beyond the mundane. Ask people their opinions on things they’ve not experienced, and possibly never will experience. Ask them about weird and wonderful things. For example:

“Tell me about your dream house.”
“Do you want to live forever?”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“What do you think it would be like to live in zero-g?”

Be prepared to provide your own thoughts on the questions they ask. And remember, that friends are the people you are supposed to share things with. Don’t be afraid to do that. The more you share, they more they will share in turn.

More seriously, about going to the Moon.

Ah, Pre-War Scientific Triumphalism. Sniff. :)

From hillarygayle:
Retro

_{My dream office?}

The title of my blog is Unspoiled by Progress: Somewhere in the 20th Century. I’ve been using this tag on BBSes and online since the mid-1990s. Originally, this was just a conflation of two interests. “Unspoiled by Progress” is a reference to PWEI, a band I quite like. “Somewhere in the 20th century” was originally a subtitle in the opening credits of Brazil, one of my favorite movies.

In time, it has also become a more literally descriptive statement for my interests and tastes. I have an appreciation for certain retro styles and looks, though it is not tied to a specific period. I like cars from the 1950s, furniture from the 1920s, and houses and décor from the 1900s. People who have been in my house will know that I have no actual capacity to decorate that way. Our house is mostly just a pile of books with an over-sized table and an upright piano sort of… lost in the clutter.

I think that my retro tastes run deeper than surface affection for styles and looks. I have a keen interest in the technology and daily life of earlier times, and for uncovering the fine details. Humanity has produced deep wells of media and art, and even focusing on a single nation and a single decade will give you a lifetime’s worth of diversion. I am constantly discovering wonderful new authors and artists, all of whom have been dead for 60 years.

This unfortunately means that I tend to be rather out of touch when it comes to current media. I don’t have cable, and I only read the front pages of the newspaper. All my current information about pop culture comes from reading the front of magazines at grocery checkouts, and from reading my Livejournal friends list.

Mouse

_{How amarafox sees me!}

One of my internet alter-egos is a talking mouse. This persona varies from normal sized mouse with the ability to talk and wear waistcoats, to a more fantastic Steampunk sort of human-sized character. The first is really just a mouthpiece or avatar of me. The second gets involved in role-play situations that have nothing to do with reality. For a while, he was the seneschal of a Fire Goddess!

Radio(shows)

_{My basement. Some of it.}

This word is more appropriate for doc_mystery, the man from whom I have obtained nearly all the classic radio shows I own. He has thousands of them in various formats, and has gifted me with several hundreds of hours of golden age shows. They’ve been a great boon to me over years of commuting and road trips.

Of course, I had a small collection of shows on tape before meeting the good Doctor, and I was also a great fan of “Theatre of the Mind,” which was broadcast on a local station every Sunday night between 11:30 PM and Midnight. The closing credits for this show are one of the most melancholy sounds in the world for me, because they’re associated with the end of the weekend and an early morning.

Quirky

_{Do I look quirky? Nonsense! Stuff and flimshaw!}

Am I quirky? I guess I am, a bit. I like to say that I am stranger than most people realize, but a lot duller than rest of you seem to think. If I am quirky, it is at least not longer as consciously pursued as it used to be. I used to try to be deliberately weird in high school as a means of establishing myself as different from everyone else. At some point, the affectations stopped being affectations and became reality. It happens to everyone.


_{Maybe a little quirky.}

Quirkiness has settled on me like some sort of particularly ugly hat, in the same way that professionalism settles on others, or whimsy, or machismo. These are descriptors we invested in, things we all chose in our formative years, and now we’re stuck with ‘em. In a way it was an easy way out. Maybe I should have played more hockey, or tried harder to be define myself by academic success. Being quirky (which for me meant playing RPGs as much as humanly possible and reading old books and being afraid of girls) required less effort.


This puts me in mind of the “Then and Now” comparison thing I did last year. The Youth is the Father of the Man.

I found this essay on my hard drive. It's not quite finished, and not well-polished, but I might as well post it, finally. I wrote this sometime last year.

Of late I’ve been reading a selection of George Orwell’s essays. His critiques of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens fired some larger thoughts, which I’ve been trying to take a moment to write down.

So, here we go.

Rudyard Kipling was intensely popular in the late 19th century as an Imperialist poet. It was he who coined the term “White Man’s Burden,” and his poetry was the backdrop of the Victorian Empire. By Orwell’s time – indeed by the end of WWI - Kipling was seldom quoted by anyone with pretensions of culture, except in a purely ironic sense. He was too hawkish and mawkish, all at once. However, he remained hugely popular with the British working class, the very class that had paid the most in blood and toil to realize the dreams of Empire, and perhaps benefited least from it.

Orwell suggested various reasons for this. He noted that Kipling’s poems often expressed fairly common sense moral principles of decency and fairplay and honour. He refers to them as “Graceful Monuments to the Obvious.”

You see these monuments almost everywhere, some of them less graceful than others. A Graceful Monument to the Obvious is a self-evident truth or commonplace moral that everyone can get behind. Orwell expressed as similar sentiment when writing about Dickens. One of the stock characters in Dickens is the kindly old rich man who hands out shillings and 100 guinea annuities and enviable positions as an office boy to all the poor characters. This is clearly a good thing to do. Almost everyone can agree with that. I’ve met people whose entire morality depends on “Monuments to the Obvious” in one form or other. Chances are, you have too.

This happens a fair bit in fandoms, with intelligent people eschewing a traditional set of morals or spiritual tradition in favour of a more recent construct. The moral code of Superman, for example, or Captain Mal Reynolds.

The Third Doctor and Captain Kirk and Mr. Pickwick all present fine, upstanding moral codes that no one can question within the context of the media. This last bit is very important, however, because they don’t exist outside of the limited and shallow context of their own fictional reality. They fight only chosen evils. Sure, Andy of Mayberry is a swell guy. But what does he think of abortion? Or homosexuals? Or capital punishment? It never comes up. The writers of the media control the situation in a way that can never happen in the real world.

And, one must surely wonder how someone as warm-hearted and generous as Mr. Pickwick (for example) ever got to the point where he had any money to give away in the first place. In the real world, while it is good for rich people to be generous, one must also realize that, in order to get rich, it’s usually necessary to eschew fair play, if not honesty outright, at some point in the game. You don’t get rich by handing out shillings to plucky urchins all day.

In that sense, Dickens’ morality was similar to those golden platitudes offered in something like Chicken Soup for the Soul, or in the scriptures of a hundred minor gurus. It is perfectly possible to read through the entirety of Chicken Soup for the Soul and find no objectionable lesson, no hard fact, and no contentious advice. The whole book may glow with the light of gentle truth. It also offers very little useful practical advice.

To put it another way, we’re all against torturing puppies. We’re all against children starving. We’re all against evil totalitarian governments showing up and taking out freedoms away. However, the real world rarely presents us with such clear-cut moral choices, in part because the world is made up of individuals who mostly share exactly the same set of basic morals. That doesn’t stop us from attempting to fit complex situations into easy moral boxes. This seldom works very well in reality.

Over the last few days, I've been finding torn pages from a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe fluttering in the street, stuck in trees, etc., as well as page fragments from a Dragonlance novel. That tugs at me in an odd way. That, and belief in unicorns.

Elizabeth and I browsed through Youtube before bed. We watched the opening credits of The Last Unicorn, which she recently declared as the "best movie I ever watched!" This video led to clips of the unicorns from the live-action film, Legend. which prompted Elizabeth to say, "Unicorns are real? I thought they were make-believe!"

I replied, "I think they put a horn on a white horse, to pretend, for a movie."

She looked at me seriously, and said that no, she was very sure it was real. I said, I didn't think it was, and she did the little eye-roll thing that all children do to their parents, sooner or later.

I admit that I have no desire to press my six-year-old daughter on her belief in the existence of unicorns. It's a good world to live in, if it has unicorns in it. It put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, and his description of "sehnsucht."

"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves..."

And, tying this all together, consideration of the fellow who committed suicide last week. Not a friend by any means. A friend of a friend, and someone I'd not met, who seemed to have dedicated his few years of adult life to trying too hard to hold on to something, a bent and battered vision of the "unnameable something" that ended up bringing him grief.

"These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

The only way to go on, really, is to keep going on.

There is an international college in Hamilton's west end that seems to only enroll students from China, though its webpage claims enrollment from 51 countries. From what I understand, it's the sort of place that lower-upper-class Chinese families send their children to learn English. The girl's dormitory, Linden Hall, is located in downtown Hamilton. When I get off the GO Transit bus from Toronto, I get onto a city bus located midway between the campus and the girl's dormitory. Most nights, this bus is full of petite Chinese girls in their late teens, on their way home.

They dress in conservative blazers and skirts, but their hair and clothing is often artfully decorated and arranged in fantastic ways. Ragged, crimped pig tails, crumpled stockings, weird bits of jewelry, and so on. They are styles I don't recognize, and don't see on local girls. They exude wealth, somehow. They have strange little computers and MP3 players and phones, all shiny titanium and glowing blue LED. They are like visions from the near future, or living characters from some obscure anime. None of them speak English amongst themselves, though they have very animated conversations in what I assume to be Mandarin.

I feel like a sort of awkward dancing bear when they're on the bus, shuffling around to avoid bumping into people. I'm six foot and 270 lbs, folded up in a heavy wool overcoat, carrying around a briefcase and topped with an increasingly shabby hat.

The girls get off at John Street, which is a major transfer point.

They get replaced by paint-and-plaster-splattered construction workers, rumpled GO Train commuters, people in scooters, and teenage mothers. They're mostly white and mostly poor, with the exception of one of two middle-class office workers, or university students who, while currently poor, are decidedly middle class.

I've often wanted to record this transition, but I don't really think people would appreciate me shooting video of school girls getting off a city bus, you know? So, today I decided to pay attention, and write about it.

Today, I got on the bus, and there were dozen or so schoolgirls, much as described above. There were also five or six young Indian or Pakistani men at the back of the bus, presumably students from McMaster University. At least one of them was wearing a leather Engineering student jacket.

At John Street, the girls left the bus, and were replaced by:

1. A 20ish white girl with a "Streisand" nose, wearing a "Jayne" hat, army surplus jacket, big boots, and carrying a crochet handbag. Definitely some kind of geek - she kept trying to read the back of the SF novel I was reading.
2. A acne-scarred male soldier, maybe 18 years old, with bright red hair, in field camo winter clothes and beret, presumably attached to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
3. A handicapped woman (Beth), aged about 70, riding a scooter (which caused some complaints from other riders) with a luxuriant growth of facial hair. I know her fairly well from my days driving a mobile soup kitchen, back around 2000.
4. A very skinny Jamaican boy, around 15, in a very large black parka and a baseball hat.
5. A pair of 40ish guys with short hair, jeans, and cheap coats, one of whom had tattoos on the backs of his hands. They talked a lot about beer and an ongoing divorce.
6. A chubby blonde girl, about 18, dressed in clothes my middle-class white nerd eyes could only describe as "hip hop" and....
7. . ...Her aunt, who was about 40, and dressed in track pants and a grey parka. The two of them talked about babies a lot, with the girl occasionally kidding(?) that she was going to get pregnant as soon as she got a boyfriend. I think she was trying to annoy her aunt.
8. A 40ish professional woman, tall and plump, who works near my office. She always has very stylishly cut and dyed hair.

When the private school girls leave the bus, there's a sort of inversion. Instead of being the awkward large outsider, I become a self-assured, middle-class intellectual. Relatively well-off, relatively well educated, with liberal/socialist ideas and well-made (if generic) clothes.

Yet, given that everyone else in the bus tends to either be a manual laborer, on social assistance, or in university, I'm still entirely disconnected and in another world. Beth, the elderly disabled woman, actually avoids making eye contact me with, presumably because she does not want to admit our prior connection.

To some of them, I'm sort of "The Man," as it were. I'm a representative of a world nearly as alien as that of the Chinese school girls. I feel more comfortable when the bus population "shifts", because it transforms to the norm for Hamilton, which is a slightly shabby, blue-collar industrial city.

But while I am "in" that world, I am not quite "of" that world.

So, there’s been some discussion and debate on Erin’s journal about high school. Specifically, the discussion was about Dungeons and Dragons. On one side of the debate was the opinion that it was better to steer kids away from D&D (and presumably all pen and paper gaming of the same or similar kind) because it would make the kids a target of bullying.

On the other side of the debate was the opinion that RPGs are a socially healthy outlet that build lasting friendships. This was usually expressed with an extra dollop of “…and, anyway, it’s the popular kids who end up in dead-end jobs,” or sentiments to that effect.

I won’t comment on the core part of the debate, at least not extensively.

However, it did spark a two other thoughts.

1. For the last few years, I’ve been of the opinion that very few people remember themselves as being popular in high school. This is because (no matter what group you are in) there will be someone who hates or disdains you. To dramatically simplify the social equation: the nerds disdain the jocks, who bully the nerds. Each group harasses the other. And of course, the larger the social group, the more internal divisions, rivalries and disagreements there will be.

The leader of my high-school cheerleader squad once wrote an anonymous article for the school newspaper describing her loss of virginity in a cluttered bedroom. It was just about the most depressing thing I’d ever read, and we didn’t print it because it contained sufficient detail to identify her. I recall that it was the first time that I really understood that people at the top of the “social chain” were not only not necessarily happy, but also had real internal lives that were just as valid as mine.

And this realization fuelled another revelation. The guys on the track team, the girls in gymnastics, etc…. they weren’t "cool." They were just keen on things I didn’t like. It was no use being disdainful of them simply because they liked things I didn’t like. They were in the same boat as me, in most ways. Why should I be sniffy about the ability to do push-ups, or play a guitar, if I didn’t want them to be scornful of my ability to write snotty editorials in the school paper?

The same could even be said of the junior executive types, who viewed life after high-school as an exercise in acquisition of wealth. I could hate their philosophy, but I couldn’t deny that they had some kind of driving interest.

The true enemy, if one actually existed, were the “real” cool people. The students who were the epitome of cool were the ones with no interests or passions whatsoever. They disdained anything that stank of effort or pleasure, and were interested only in ensuring that everyone else regarded life with the same level of studied nonchalance. In their world, the desire to excel at anything was dangerous.

In my opinion, it would almost be better to be a passionate stamp-collector with no friends at all. I say “almost”, because of my second point.


2. When we talk about social groups in high-school teasing or bullying other groups, we often forget that these are, in fact, GROUPS of people. The “gamers” are a group of people with common interests and passions, just as the chess team, the football players, the Drama club, etc., are.

As such, any individual within that group has a support structure, and has friends, or at least acquaintances. The students that we should really worry about are the true outcasts, the ones with no friends or social group at all, the people that are scorned even by the neediest of nerds.

I can think of two examples from my high-school. One, a very clever girl who suffered from cerebral palsy. She was in the gifted student group, but could not fit in. She had a crush on me, and I had one on her in the 9th and 10th grade… until I realized that no one liked her. She was plump, dressed in obvious charity store products (before that was cool), talked about Russia and physics incessantly, and didn’t wash her air often enough. She walked oddly, talked oddly, and had acne. People noticed that we sat together a lot… noticed also the surreptitious half-hugs and what-not, and the fact that we joked together.

The teasing I was subjected to because of my friendship with and evident attraction to this girl drove me to rather cruelly avoid her from that year onward. I don’t know how she took it, but she essentially disappeared from even the “nerd trips” the group took, and generally was by herself anytime I saw her after that. I fervently hope that she found a social group and romance in university, or in her career.

The second was a fellow who LOOKED like a nerd, and even had nerdly interests. He loved SF and comic books. However, he was not clever. In fact, I think he was possibly developmentally delayed and was in mostly remedial classes. He had no social skills. To be seen in his company was the mark of social doom. So, he was avoided by everyone, and the butt of jokes even at the hands of people who should have had at least a trace of empathy. He was desperate for friendship. He tried to become the class clown, and failed.

I still see him from time to time, and his lot has not changed. He lurks at a local comic book store for one afternoon a month, and never speaks to anyone. Just stands, smiling, by the register, for an hour… then takes his comics and walks out.

I think arguing against evolution in the name of God is akin to arguing against meteorology.

Assuming that God makes weather (or at least guides the systems that create the conditions we regard as weather) why is it that no one decries meteorologists for describing or attempting to predict the way those systems work? After all, meteorology is an imperfect science with a great many inaccuracies, proof of man's arrogance in trying to determine the mind of God.

(Of course, there is scriptural support for meteorology in Matthew 16:1-3, so, okay, maybe that's a bad example.)

Anyway, my point is that evolution does not deny the existence of God, a god, many gods, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, nor does it provide any particular explanation for the creation of the universe. It's a description of a process - you can accept God as the motivator of that process without denying his existence.

I understand why Biblical literalists and Young Earth people argue against evolution. I don't agree with the foundation of their arguments, but I understand that they must argue against evolution as a "logical" result of their belief. What baffles me are those who deny "macroevolution" (the creation of new species) while happily accepting adaptation or "microevolution." They regard their position as enlightened - and there are certainly a few scientists who take issue with macroevolution and who level serious scientific criticisms against it. However, the average person with this view often has totally outrageous ideas about what evolution actually entails. You get nonsense like Kirk Cameron and the Banana, or worse.

(At his site, Kirk Cameron claims that "bypassing the intellect" is the only way to convert people. Then his next video uses logical arguments to convince people that evolution is false. The arguments are false and based on crap, but they are definitely not trying to "bypass" the intellect of their victims. Kirk Cameron needs to be beaten up by a tag-team of Jesuits and 18th century logicians, or something. Go on - watch the video about evolution. They ambush college kids and present them with straw men arguments and misleading logic. One person is asked to point to a transitional species, and can't. And, since a 20-year-old kid can't name a transitional species, they must not exist! Hello? Archaeopteryx? They present anti-evolution quotes from such scientific luminaries as Malcolm Muggeridge. Malcolm Muggeridge. The satirist/journalist. It's like trying to debunk quantum mechanics by quoting Andy Rooney. The whole video is laughable and frightening.)

Finally, there's simply a class of Christian (or Hindu, or Muslim, or what-have-you) that seems to think that there are mysteries we aren't meant to know. They react to theories and ideas as though they were somehow unseating or diminishing God. This has been happening for a long time.

The question you have to ask yourself is this - "What kind of crummy God/god/godess/gods do you worship, that our discoveries about divine creation can somehow threaten or diminish Him/Her/It/Them?"

Biblical literalism is a thin defense, especially if you happen to be Protestant. Martin Luther stripped out entire books because he disagreed with them. You may argue that he was divinely inspired to do so, but then you must accept that God allowed Christians to use a false text as their sole guide for 1500 years. You have to assume that the original synods and councils that selected the books for inclusion in the Bible were not divinely inspired - and in fact diabolically misled.

Or, you can be Catholic (or Orthodox) and believe that Luther was fooled by the devil! No matter what sect or denomination a Christian hails from, they must believe that one version of the Bible is divinely inspired, and the other an abomination. Alternately, they can accept that both Luther and the bishops were simply acting according to their human interpretation of the Divine Will and came to different conclusions, presumably because the Divine permitted it. This somewhat takes the shine off Biblical literalism.

One of my favorite quotes about this whole matter comes from Charles McKay's 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

"Some peculiar custom may disgrace the people amongst whom it flourishes; yet men of a little wisdom refuse to aid in its extirpation, merely because it is old. Thus it is with human belief, and thus it is we bring shame upon our own intellect.

To this cause may be added another, also mentioned by Lord Bacon -- a misdirected zeal in matters of religion, which induces so many to decry a newly-discovered truth, because the Divine records contain no allusion to it, or because, at first sight, it appears to militate, not against religion, but against some obscure passage which has never been fairly interpreted...

... Who does not remember the outcry against the science of geology, which has hardly yet subsided? Its professors were impiously and absurdly accused of designing to 'hurl the Creator from his throne.' They were charged with sapping the foundations of religion, and of propping atheism by the aid of a pretended science.

The very same principle which leads to the rejection of the true, leads to the encouragement of the false."

And that's what I think.