If we want to change the future, the single biggest way we influence that is by use of words and phrases for the memes that they represent. Ideas are what people store in their minds and use to construct their belief about reality. I didn't understand this until I read philosophy. We can confront a different future by exploiting ideas. We can reconstruct what other people think, by removing faulty ideas from the superstructure of beliefs.
If we want people to stop glorifying an imaginary friend, we need to stop using misleading phrases.
My daughter and I were trying to find a restaurant and couldn't see it nearby in a city we don't know. She punched in the name in a phone and used GPS to find it in a row of businesses you couldn't see from the highway. She called it a god send. That's the kind of stuff we all say without thinking.
That snapped me back to reality. I said, "you know, when you say that it takes away the credit from all the hard working scientists and engineers that worked for decades to make cellphones and the GPS satellite system."
This is nothing more than a comforting idea to religious people and it really has no place in our society.
It steals credit for the sacrifice that those people made; and by saying it we are perpetuating wrong ideas that are actually church doctrine and not reality. We need the next generation to understand our parents made those things, not divine intervention, and not church doctrine. The god of the gaps argument is an indoctrination idea that we can't afford any longer.
Let's not undermine what humans did by praising the wrong things and allowing the wrong ideas.
Instead, let's teach our kids about the GPS satellites, how they were launched into space and how they orbit until they burn up and reenter. Nothing mysterious in that.
