Bloggers I Have Met

Privacy Policy

The following is from an assignment my son did for one of her classes.  It was to be something about her most life changing event.  It starts out a bit slow, but at the end of the third paragraph it will grab you.

horizontal rule

Manuscript Speech
Jaime Huffman
Comm 101

As people get to know me they often brand me as being a pessimist. I then have to correct them and explain that there is a difference between cynicism and pessimism. After that they’ll think they have me figured out, just another cynical youth. Seen it before they think, one more young person who doesn’t care about anyone or anything. But again they are wrong about me. Yes I’m cynical but my attitude doesn’t stem out of apathy. I care about the world and I care about the future but something fills me with doubt that anything can be done to change current courses of destruction. I believe I know what this thing is; it is my loathing of the general public. I like individual people well enough but humans as a whole I don’t trust at all. And I am going to share with you how this came about. I can remember the exact day I lost my faith in humanity.
It was in the fall of my junior year in high school. I’ve always taken as many advanced courses as possible in school so that I would be having classes with the smarter students and this year was no exception. I was taking Accelerated English and one of our more interesting projects we’d do during the year were “book talks.” The person presenting would bring in a book they had read that year and talk about it to the class. After describing the book that person would give out two questions to the class and one by one the students would give their personal answers and we would discuss.
That fall my presentation had come and I took my seat on the old rough couch at the head of the classroom. Most of the other 20 students were in desks arranged in a circle around the classroom although some were lounging in beanbags and on the other couch at the back of the room. Our teacher took his seat in a desk and I brought out my book: Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith. I explained the basic points of the book, ignoring the occasional snide comments I got from some classmates. Then I gave out my two questions. I don’t remember the second one anymore, I don’t even remember if we got to discussing it. However, I remember my first question clearly. I formed it specifically to be generic but apply to the topic at hand. I asked them, “If a belief you held was shown to be irrational would you abandon that belief?”
Any rational person would only find one answer to this question, I was sure of it. One by one my classmates shared their answers going around the circle. They would speak in quiet voices and talk in circles as if they didn’t have any determination behind their words. It was clear I had made them very uncomfortable and that they weren’t sure what to believe. I was proud of my question, maybe I had finally managed to get these students to think and question their own beliefs.
Then it came time for my teacher to answer, he sat up straight in his chair and spoke in his soft but wise voice. I only remember one sentence that he said in his answer, it is forever etched in my mind. “Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.”
To this day I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that as disgusting as that proclamation, “Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.” The rest of the class immediately began chattering with renewed energy. They were agreeing with him. I don’t remember much after that, I was too stunned. Here my teacher and mentor was putting forth the most absurd statement I’d ever heard. And my peers, the advanced students, the future of our planet, were agreeing with him. They all thought that it was a perfectly reasonable idea, this madness that he proposed.
You see, before I asked that question I’d always thought that people were just ignorant. I thought that maybe they were just misinformed and that I could reason with them and logically explain the world around them. From politics and economics to religion and morality I’ve always had very different set of beliefs than most people. I’d never been able to comprehend how someone could give all their political support to one political party’s ideals instead of thinking for themselves. Or how they could consider that the government had a right to a cut of a man’s work through the income tax. I never understood how no matter what facts or evidence or logical errors I pointed out to them they still clung to their beliefs. Now I know.
“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.” This single idea has a complete disregard for truth. It doesn’t matter that the world has been proven round, you can still believe it’s flat if you want to. It doesn’t matter if all evidence shows that people have the same genetic code no matter what their skin color is; you can still believe some are inferior if you want to. What this statement means is that you can believe whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be true. There are no right or wrong answers, everyone’s beliefs are equally valid.
I’ve always based my beliefs on truth. If something I believed turned out not to be true then I’d just have to get rid of that belief. All questions have a right answer and a wrong answer, it’s just a matter of figuring out which is right. And until that day in English class I’d thought that was how everyone else thought as well. Now I see the world through different eyes, I understand. People may be ignorant, yes. But it is a willful ignorance. They don’t want the truth. No matter how many times I explain they are wrong, no matter how much evidence I give them they don’t care. Their belief makes them feel good and that’s good enough for them.
And this understanding of people’s willful ignorance leads directly to my lack of faith in humanity. I don’t trust people to fix the political system, I don’t trust people to see religion for what it is, I don’t trust people to see the truth that is in front of them, and I don’t trust people to be smart. People don’t want to question their beliefs, they’re happy being ignorant and it doesn’t matter how much I argue with them they won’t change. Therefore they are not worth my time. The majority of mankind doesn’t care for truth and so I don’t care for them.