If I find myself trying to justify something I'm about to do, I know that it is the wrong thing to do.

Aside from that, I was raised Catholic, and I've been working to recognize and eliminate the things in my life that are built on abstract, unobservable and unprovable things. For the last fifteen years or so I've been trying to strip the dogma that I was raised with out of my head. So much of what goes wrong in the world comes from people being raised to believe in things that they can't see, and believing those things so strongly that they'll kill for those beliefs, run for office and deny people their freedoms based on those beliefs, and block out reality based on those beliefs.

I don't know how to articulate it succinctly, and I don't know how to do it without sounding like a militant atheist... I'm not. I just think that the next big step for humanity is learning how to get past tribalism. We won't survive if we always see people outside of our 'tribe' as a threat. We won't progress if we can't stop arguing about whether or not someone kneeling during the anthem is a patriotic act of free speech protest, or a traitorous defiant act against the troops and realize that we shouldn't be singing songs to pieces of cloth in the first place, and especially not at secular sporting events.

Like I say, I don't know how to sum it up. There's a nice existence we could all be living if we didn't get ourselves riled up over things that aren't real.