A person I hardly know walks up to me with a distinct look of urgency about them. With a concerned, sincere and almost parental level of credibility they want to warn me of something very dire.
“The first Pope of the third millennium has died, and the Holy land is still divided. This is a sure sign of the end of days. The Apocalypse is upon us.”
A few things will happen at this point, I will attempt to remove myself from the conversation as quickly as I can. It’s not urgent, I’m not compelled to get away from the Armageddonist with the same need that would motivate me to get away from an amorous professional wrestler named Lumpy, but I’m still going to leave. I will be civil, and I may even thank him.
What I will not do is sprint home (as this would make the thick, rich fat in my veins boil causing me to burst) and consult my copy of the King James Bible. I will not double check the contents of the Book of Revelations. I will not worry and I will not fret. I could turn this into a poem, I bet.
Sorry.
The reason that I will not become anxious over this warning is not because I am not religious. As a “soft” atheist I am not inclined to believe in any god right now, but I also don’t think that I’m smart enough to rule the whole thing out. So my disinclination toward godliness will not be what tips the scale. Upon final consideration, what will throw this piece of eschatological prudentia into the garbage heap is that I can honestly say that while the Days End scenario was presented with a chain of evidence and a process of cause and effect, it is one with which I am sufficiently familiar and can therefore comfortably ignore. If I am relatively secure in my belief that such assertions are flawed from within, I’m not going to bother with it.
But say what I want about his evidence, his premise and his conclusion, I must at least concede this; at least he had these things in his message. Most people do not.
The very sad fact is that people who speak about far more mundane, but more verifiable things do so with little or no evidence at all. As for linkage between their premise and their conclusion, most aren’t even aware of the meaning of those terms. Given that I am a snooze-inducing centrist (Ignore La Revolution!) my next point will not come as a surprise. This is not a lefty problem; this is not a righty problem. This is a stupid problem.
It is a problem of stupid people, by stupid people and for stupid people.
There are people (my best guess is that there are two of them) who might read this and say, “Hey, this is about me.” My reply is that, if you think so, it probably is.
People I know will discuss religion, sports, politics, philosophy and a million other things. Some will have well-constructed arguments, some will be making crap up as they go along and still others will be belching out oily clouds of partisan hackery that they memorized from some horrid fecal engine like Michael Moore or Sean Hannity. 
But even these people have linkage and something resembling a logical chain of cause and effect. It may be a weak and evil chain like the one that Moore has about those villains who stand between him and cheeseburgers, or the cheese-and-meat-head claims of Hannity as he seeks to prove that he almost certainly drinks from unflushed toilets.
They are vile and horrid Sophists and propagandists, but at least they have a point. While they conclude to awful things, at least they conclude.
What I am referring to is the intellectual bankruptcy of relativism; the pimply faced, shrill ugly child of the philosophical family. Fact does not matter because, well they just don’t. Facts are stupid and mean and don’t allow me to make unsupported claims at random about varying subjects such as how Chef Boyardee is out to get me and why the government stole my copy of Johnny Get Your Gun or whatever piece of indulgent crap you were reading.
If the only thing you showed up to say is that none of these assertions matter because they are all just opinion, well that’s just your opinion. As such, rather than bother me with your hollow and vacuous statements of intellectual surrender, go to your dermatologist buy some degreaser and be quiet. I have no use for you.
If you are a radical or a fool, I can argue with you. If you are a relativist, you are the intellectual equivalent of dandruff. You are the detritus of real discourse, a foul byproduct.
Go away
