I never said they were willfully ignorant - learn to READ, please!!! I simply said that they will not accept anything if it endangers their petty little pet beliefs. (And YOU are certainly one the people I had in mind when I made those statements. You and others like you are very reminiscent of the old foolish saying: "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts!" How fitting that you would complain about my post which was in agreement with the one I was replying to.
Isn't it funny that you are one of the members who hesitate to look into anything in detail before rejecting it? For some weird reason, you never displayed any form of intellectual curiosity. You were more than confident that you were right every time you said something is nonsense. Now that very confidence is based on the existing scientific belief system propagated by other scientific believers or the ones who failed to experiment on their own before rejecting a field and was never once rejected on facts nor observation. Suppose if the ones who first said something regarding pseudoscience was completely ignorant about the subject and rejected it based on logic, then the rest of the people who subscribe to that view end up making a fool out of themselves.
Can we restrain from the personal attacks and pointing out particular posters styles? It's insulting, and completely derails the thread. - Thanks.
I don't think it's consevatives in general, though you may be pointing to something interesting. Are people conservatives because they are willfully ignorant? Because they hold on to the ideas in which they were indoctrinated and can not let go of those beliefs out of fear of the unknown? If willful ignorance is born out of a fear, than perhaps it is a mental defect. Ann Coulter is a good example of someone who is willfully ignorant out of fear. She fears becoming what she's been taught to hate. She's extremely agressive and masculine because she fears being a cream-puff or Stepford Wife. Is fear of losing onto thoughts, and the fear of being lost without them the mental defect?
People are conservatives because they are uncomfortable with change. They aren't necessarily ignorant. There are lots of cosmopolitan well-educated conservatives and there are lots of knee-jerk liberal dolts. Conservatives are wary of the stress and uncertainty that comes with the adoption of new ideas, and these days that's easy to understand. You've all seen the graph of the Change Curve. It dips for some arbitrary length of time before it starts rising, and it takes a while to recover to its initial level before things actually start to get better--hopefully. That space beneath the X axis is called "The Valley of Despair." And of course liberals are impatient so just about the time the Change Curve has almost bottomed out they try to speed things up by implementing another change on top of the first one, so it's downhill again for a while and the Valley of Despair gets deeper. Conservatives prefer stability to progress. "Better the devil we know than the one we don't."
It's seems like the only way to be willfully ignorant is to know that the answer is right in front of you, but you don't look at because you don't want to know, what the answer is. I can sympathize with that. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. But if you no you're wrong then you're not ignorant, you know what's going on, you're just in denial. Which I can also sympathize with to some extent.
