Leon <blackman@pacific.net.sg> asked:
> does anybody think teaching critical thinking at a young age (<>6)
> would be helpful? perhaps it would bring about a more extropian
> society?
Yes definitely! Start even earlier than this and never let up! Send out missionaries to catch people that were missed at young ages...
> if yes, how do you think it could be implemented?
Do it exactly the way organized religion works so that people don't have critical thinking abilities. Bombard the kids with anything possible as soon as possible for as long as possible. Have large well organized societies, Sunday schools, have family meetings and workshops where you relentlessly work on the stuff, put more critical thinking people (as in trained religious leaders) around children sooner and longer (i.e. the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world) and so on.
Just think about it. Such early applied brainwashing techniques have successfully convinced almost the entire lay population to abandon critical thinking, to give up hope and to think everyone must die, suffer, and so on for this or that theodicy and whatever. The real key to the success of these anti critical thinking memes promoted by organized religion is their ability to take their horribly hideous, hopeless, and faithless ideas like some God must, instead of pulling us up to his level, must descend to our level and infinitely suffer and hideously die for our "sins" and they are able to successfully convince people that such ideas are something to hope for and have faith in. They are able to successfully twist their thinking so that they believe abandoning such hideous ideas is what is faithless and hopeless. That is why the world works so hard pushing and fighting against critical thinking.
Imagine how much more successful such intense brain washing techniques could be if they were applied towards rational thinking about real, reliable, and natural scientific miracles and other truly good and hopeful things instead of such irrational fairy tails, neither world after-lives, unreliable, unnatural, ununderstandable miracles, justifications and acceptance of evil, hate, suffering, and all the other faithless absurdities that organized religion is so successful with.
I think the key is to get people to critically realize what faith and hope really are. If an omnipotent God can't eliminate evil (as in suffering, dieing...) for whatever reason, how can we ever have faith that it can or should be, or hope to be able to over come evil? You are instead left with attempting to come up with theodicies to justify and accept evil rather than hoping it can be overcome.
But if there is not yet such a God?... Hey, maybe we can hope overcoming evil isn't that hard after all!? And even better - work with such a hopeful assumption that it might really be that easy rather than giving up and merely miserably waiting for God to end our lives for us as he allegedly did for his poor miserable "only begotten Son".
I think all that is required to get more critical thinking in the world is *REAL* faith and hope.
Brent Allsop