The difference between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters all in one graphic.

Courtesy of Inside Same Grain: 

Trump supporters are more likely to believe in most paranormal phenomena - angels, ghosts, alien visits, conspiracy theories, and Big Foot. Clinton supporters are only more likely to believe in psychics. The biggest difference between Trump and Clinton is with a belief in Big Foot; Trump supporters are 28% more likely to believe in the mythological ape-like creature. Clinton supporters' stronger belief in psychics is likely due to to the fact that women, from whom she enjoys strong support, are more likely to believe in psychics. Note also that Clinton supporters are nearly 40% more likely to have no paranormal beliefs. 

If you get right down to it this is really the thing.

The thing that separates the rational from the irrational.

The less intelligent superstitious are easily convinced to put critical thinking aside in favor of feelings, or intuition, or even faith. All of which are easily manipulated to lead them down the path toward making choices that are harmful to them personally or harmful to all of us as a nation.

These are people that Donald Trump, a rabid consumer of conspiracy theories, understands on a fundamental level. And in turn they also feel a connection to him.

This is why fact checking and in depth reporting has no impact on his support.

They BELIEVE they know him, and no facts to the contrary will shake their faith. 

In response to question about Syrian refugees Ben Carson brags about the size of his frontal lobes.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

"We should use our expertise and resources to help get them resettled — over there — and to support them over there,” he said. “But to bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.” 

“You know that the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals, because we can engage in rational thought processing.” 

The former neurosurgeon noted that his advanced brain gave him the ability to “extract information from the past [and] present, process it, and project it into a plan.” 

“Animals, on the other hand, have big brain stems and rudimentary things because they react,” Carson explained. “We don’t have to just react, we can think.”

You know I actually agree with Carson that human beings DO possess the ability to use rational thought processes.

However knowing that Carson realizes that as well, makes it all the more difficult to understand why he believes that humans cannot have morality without God, that Noah's flood was real and Evolution was inspired by Satan, and that the pyramids were built to store grain instead of the bodies of he pharaohs?

Does this mean that Ben Carson's frontal lobes are not that big? (Not that size is everything of course.)

Or perhaps it means that he simply refuses to utilize them if by doing so it endangers his faith in certain mythologies or conspiracy theories.

When it comes to listening to Ben Carson lecture people about using their developed brains for reasoning, I cannot help but to fall back on that old "Physician heal thyself" chestnut.

The real cancer in this country is fairly easy to detect.

The idea that seemingly rational people can say, or accept, this kind of thing absolutely boggles my freaking mind.

One of my favorite quotes from Dr. House.

A little more confrontational than I like to be, however I certainly understand the sentiment.

Polling shows that belief in God and faith in religion on the decline in America.

Courtesy of Harris Interactive:  

A new Harris Poll finds that while a strong majority (74%) of U.S. adults do believe in God, this belief is in decline when compared to previous years as just over four in five (82%) expressed a belief in God in 2005, 2007 and 2009. Also, while majorities also believe in miracles (72%, down from 79% in 2005), heaven (68%, down from 75%), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (68%, down from 72%), the resurrection of Jesus Christ (65%, down from 70%), the survival of the soul after death (64%, down from 69%), the devil, hell (both at 58%, down from 62%) and the Virgin birth (57%, down from 60%), these are all down from previous Harris Polls. 

Belief in Darwin's theory of evolution, however, while well below levels recorded for belief in God, miracles and heaven, is up in comparison to 2005 findings (47%, up from 42%). 

The survey also finds that 42% of Americans believe in ghosts, 36% each believe in creationism and UFOs, 29% believe in astrology, 26% believe in witches and 24% believe in reincarnation - that they were once another person. (I find it somewhat hysterical that there are more people who believe in ghosts than believe in creationism.)

Turning to the political spectrum, Democrats and Independents show similar levels of belief in most of the tested concepts, with Republicans consistently more likely than either group to express belief in those concepts aligned with the Judeo-Christian belief system; Republicans are less likely than either group to express belief in Darwin's theory of evolution (36% Republicans, 52% Democrats, 51% Independents). 

In a separate line of questioning, focused on Americans' degree of certainty that there is or is not a God, two-thirds of Americans (68%) indicate being either absolutely or somewhat certain that there is a God, while 54% specify being absolutely certain; these figures represent drops of 11 and 12 percentage points, respectively, from 2003 testing, where combined certainty was at 79% and absolute certainty was at 66%. 

Meanwhile, combined belief that there is no God (16%) and uncertainty as to whether or not there is a God (also 16%) are both up from 2003 findings (when these levels were 9% and 12%, respectively). 

Just under half of Americans believe that all or most of the Old Testament (49%) and the New Testament (48%) are the "Word of God," representing declines of six percentage points each from 2008 findings. (I continue to be stunned that so many people have so much faith in this book when just about every careful examination of its contents reveals problems with translation, with historical accuracy, and with made of locations and characters. And that is WITHOUT throwing in the whole idea that the people who wrote it were divinely inspired.)

Just under two in ten Americans (19%) describe themselves are "very" religious, with an additional four in ten (40%) describing themselves as "somewhat" religious (40%, down from 49% in 2007). Nearly one-fourth of Americans (23%) identify themselves as "not at all" religious - a figure that has nearly doubled since 2007, when it was at 12%.

Progress is on the side of the rational, however I cannot help but be a little impatient in waiting for the rest of the country to catch up to where I have been for almost five decades.

In my opinion this country will never truly have the opportunity to be great until we remove the fundamentalist element that permeates our politics and places constraints on women's control over their bodies, gay rights, the teaching of science, and public education.

By the way this article contained many more fascinating statistics, and I suggest that all of you click the link at the top to read more.

Oh, well now I get it.

Yep, the LAST thing you want to do as human beings is utilize the one thing that separates you from every other creature on the planet and allows you to remain the dominate species.

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates, via Plato.

Finally thought of the day.

Ann Druyan talking about love, faith, and the death of her husband, Carl Sagan:

"When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. 

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . 

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."

(Source.)

9 year old explains the universe. I suggest that people take notes.

This 9 year old is light years ahead of many grownups on this planet and has the kind of rational thinking skills that often do not develop until well into a persons late teens.

I am of two minds while watching this:

First why is it so hard for adults to fathom the simplicity of his explanation?

And second how soon can we send this kid to Congress? Because this is exactly the kind of intelligence that we desperately need to run our country.

Damn I wish when I was nine years old and questioning the universe, and my place in it, that I had met this kid. It would have saved me years of lonely research and solitary quests for knowledge.

(Source)

An homage to the light that science now shines on the universe around us, and a look back at the darkness from which we emerged.

"It was science that brought us out of the darkness, and showed us what we needed to know. That opened our eyes to reality. That gave us everything the gods denied us."

And yet today science and education are under constant attack. NOT because they are failing to do their jobs, but because they are doing it too well.

We owe it to our children, our country, and our species to constantly learn and discover, so that we may someday truly understand from whence we came, and to where we are going.

New studies of the brain indicate that Republicans and Democrats use different parts of it to make political decisions. Guess which one uses their "threat response system!"

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes. 

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it. 

I interviewed the paper's lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, "nothing is all genes, or all environment." These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways. 

And if Hatemi's and McDermott's research blows your mind, get this: Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants' publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats. 

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

Okay I have read various versions of these studies the past several days and they are both fascinating and frustrating to me.

According to the data there does not seem to be a whole lot that one can do to change a person's political point of view. Which in some ways explains why introducing new facts to people with a conservative perspective seems to be a waste of perfectly good data. They simply refuse to accept its existence or challenge the methods by which is was gathered.

It also seems to explain why conservatives are so incredibly concerned about gun ownership and national security. They apparently base their world view on the fear center of their brains, which is constantly on alert for danger, while where as the more liberal among us are using the insula, whihc has been described by neurosurgeons as the following:

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human. 

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.

Well that certainly explains quite a lot doesn't it?

Essentially, according to the new research, Republicans make their political decisions based on fear, and Democrats tend to make them based on empathy and moral intuition.

Sounds reasonable to me.

The descent of the Modernists.

Sometimes it feels like I have been waiting at the bottom of this staircase forever waiting for the rest of the world to join me.

However, in my opinion, every step made by the individual is a victory for rational thought and for the progress of the world.