Fred Phelps and the Duty to Think

So, it appears that the reason Heath Ledger died is because he made Brokeback Mountain, and God killed him as punishment. (ht Possommomma)

The problem is that people like this vote.

The right to vote implies a duty to think.

A duty to think implies a duty to ask, "What if I am wrong?" And if the consequences of being wrong are that others are unjustly harmed, then the morally responsible person then asks, "How do I make sure that I am not wrong?"

Phelps and his kind draw their conclusions, then they select the evidence, pointing to whatever might support their conclusion as 'proof' while ignoring anything against it.

The morally responsible person seeks to remove bias. He thinks in terms of control groups and study groups. He looks for statistical differences between the two, for relationships between independent variable and dependent variables, and then tests the relationships he suggests by seeing if they support other observations.

People who use this method - people who ask, "What if I am wrong?" and then try to make sure that they are not wrong by using this method, are (at least in this regard) so massively morally superior to the likes of Phelps.

Indeed, this is one further piece of evidence that scripture is not the work of any morally perfect divine being. This is not too difficult for a primitive tribesmen of several thousand years ago to understand. Yet, they were not told of these simple moral responsibility.

As such, we have moral degenerates such as Phelps believing that the morally vaccuous rantings of primitive tribesmen gives him moral guidance, refusing to exercise or even to comprehend the moral responsibility to think.