Georgia NeSmith
2 min readSep 11, 2018

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Thank you for acknowledging this. It’s the same phenomenon I observed with what I call the “evangelical left.” Among a group that is supposed to be (and for the most part, is) better educated and more adept at using logic than the right, any evidence or logic that contradicted their ideological commitments was immediately suspect and ignorable. These include many friends and a few family — I grew up in a lefty family & attended anti-war demonstrations with my parents; they were Great Books leaders and read aloud to each other the classic Western philosophers, including Marx. Weird relative to other families in so many ways.

I had to block a family member who kept posting fake stories about Hillary & Obama from what we now know are Russian sponsored sites. He kept doing it even after I pointed out the sites were pro trump.

Confirmation bias is exactly the same phenomenon that enabled the presumed rational left to be easily manipulated by those sites.

There are, of course, plenty of radical right “Christian” claims that atheism causes pedophelia.

Sometimes I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness, with no group where I feel comfortable or welcomed because I point out irrational arguments wherever I find them.

And then there are arguments with people who depend entirely on rationality to determine truth. Faith in pure rationality as the only perceptual means by which one may arrive at truth is, if I may, also irrational.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern.” — William Blake.

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Georgia NeSmith
Georgia NeSmith

Written by Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.

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