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Notes -
raises hand for also being non-college, not particularly smart or capable, and firmly stuck in lower middle-class pink collar jobs - no, I do not have a 'career' or any sniff of one, so you're not the sole instance at least
There's a guy over on ACX with whom I am having a (courteous! but frank!) exchange of views on "atheists need ecstasy" (and no he doesn't mean this but rather mysticism in a secular dress).
It's an interesting post on his own blog and I vehemently disagree with the thrust of it - that you can tidily snip away the religious nonsense and have a Gosh Wow Cosmic Sensawunda I Effin' LOVE Science secular remainder, but he's at least trying to address the dry and sterile atheist (of some sections of the project) viewpoint towards what you instance here.
As for the rest of it, I'm not a Hobbesian but yeah. Original Sin, there's a reason this was a winning concept. We're not lovely kind-hearted bonobos (has the bononbo ideal society thing been busted yet? I vaguely remember a while back there was some re-assessment that not everything in their society was as rosy as presented), we're flawed and fallen beings, and violence, greed, illness, and general "ugh someone should do something about all this" are part of that. I don't know the ins and outs of the Neely case, but someone in the throes of a schizophrenic breakdown can't be reasoned with or talked down from their delusions. I am not saying 'strangle the homeless to death' but again, I agree that this is the strawman that is leapt to as a misrepresentation of one's views if there is any deviation once the narrative has been set about the powerless, the privileged, and 'social workers not cops'.
If I'm being bitchy about it (surely not you, FarNearEverywhere!), then there's a ton that they assume and don't recognise comes from being brought up in circumstances where there weren't worries about paying bills, sorry we can't afford a new pair of shoes this week so keep wearing the ones with the hole in the sole, and the rest of it; where college and a professional career were the natural path in life; where everyone was nice and you talked things out and nobody you knew ever got into a fistfight or had been attacked in the streets. It's that saying about fish and water. If they fall into the right age range and get the lectures about White Privilege, they may repeat such things, but deep down they don't really understand it, their notion is "well I'm white which means I benefit from systemic racism at large in society" and think about their privilege vis-à-vis the BIPOC and LGBT+ minorities, but they don't think about their privilege vis-à-vis "when I was a kid, I never even had to be aware of the cost of the grocery bills and certainly the store owner never came to our house to warn us about running up a tab and we needed to pay it off or else".
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