I usually have no desire to read YouTube comments whatsoever, but recently realised this means I have been oblivious to those on my own uploads. Today, out of curiosity, I sorted them by “most discussed” and was genuinely astounded to find a flame war to the tune of 157 comments has been raging on Dawkins’ interview with Deepak Chopra.
So of course I couldn’t help myself but to read a few. And this very quickly snowballed into me skimming through the whole lot. Now, I know there is a stigma out there about YouTube comments, but reading them all was actually pretty interesting.
No, really. Stay with me here…
Interesting in the “I am observing the humans demonstrate their primal instinct of fear” kind of way. Quite poignantly, the comments reflect what we see in the video itself: while discussions questioning people’s beliefs have the potential to be rigorous intellectual debate, they inevitably degrade into insults and defensive remarks. This observation is what prompted me to upload the clip in the first place.
The behaviour of irrationally defending one’s beliefs is entirely understandable as an instinctive response to protect the safeguards one has erected to protect against fear, but this doesn’t make it justified. We suppress our instincts on a daily basis, so should have the ability to transcend them for the purposes of objective analysis.
Some of my favourite comments:
“Science may be a little ‘arrogant’ but time will prove that science has every right to be arrogant.”
“Dawkins isn’t a fundamentalist because he knows what it would take to change his mind.”
“Science will be the end of humanity if anything will be”
“Why should we ‘atheists’ find evidence of a god? We are not the ones making the claim that there is a god.”
“Their brains are so closed, it’s unbelievable. Eat Dawkins’ shit.”
“I would liken Dawkins to a dung beetle not an ant.”
One final point worth considering. Chopra’s exploits and abuse of scientific terms aside, aren’t his spiritual ideals simply reflecting what humans have been doing throughout all of history? Back when our scientific knowledge was much more limited, we developed supernatural or spiritual explanations for phenomena we couldn’t adequately explain through science.
I’m starting to think this is not as simplistic as “Chopra is a nutjob and science is infallible.”
…Nah, I still think he’s a nutjob.
