We Humanists are very big on reason. It isn’t that we don’t honor our emotions; we just think that as fun as they can be – they aren’t always that reliable when it comes to decision-making. Long story short, we respect our emotions and we allow them to have input, but we don’t let our emotions make our decisions for us. We use our reason for that.
I bring this up because there has been a lot of fear mongering going on lately. And making decisions based on fear usually doesn’t end well. That is because fear tends to distort reality and making good decisions depends entirely on dealing productively with reality. After all – you don’t want to do something stupid because you were too fearful to get your facts straight.
As a current example - one side of the health care debate is telling people that if they support health care reform – you or someone you love will die! Pretty scary – but easily proven as lies. There are plenty of perfectly rational reasons why you may or may not support health care reform. Fear of death panels, rationing or the specter of socialism should not be amongst those reasons.
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