The argument from assumptions

we are born into a family, state, religion, culture,
a society…and each aspect of those has their own
beliefs, values, ism’s, which they spend years indoctrinating
children into believing…for example, both the state and religion,
for different reasons, spends years indoctrinating children into
the belief of there being a god… or that state being #1
superior to all other states or societies…USA, USA, USA, USA,

by the time a child is ten, they have a ready made belief
system already created and taught by the education system,
schools…they are the assumptions that we are suppose
to live our lives by… within those assumptions
exists values that we would call conservative values
and liberal values… and all of us are raised within a value
system, that is driven by the state, religion, society, the
culture, the media…I was raised in a upper class,
secular, mid-west, fairly liberal family… and I held those
values until I was 20… when the election of Raygun, I was
radicalized, I became an anarchist… I overcame my
childhood indoctrinations and values…
I was now, for the first time in my life, holding values
and beliefs that were mine, not the family or the state
or the church or the society values, but my own values
derived from my own understanding of what it meant to
be a human being… I was driven, in part, by my reading
of Nietzsche…but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t
making assumptions that were held by the state or the
society… If I was making assumptions, they were my own
and found by my own understanding of what it meant
to be human…

now today, as I have age, I have very few assumptions,
as I have put my beliefs through the fire… what I believe in
today, is the product of years of thought and examples I
have worked through in living…

I believe in liberal values because they hold for me, the
best chance I have of reaching my full possibilities…
but my liberal values aren’t just assumptions…
I have lived them, for decades…

and the problem with people, especially conservatives, is
that they hold to assumptions that haven’t been proven and
they base their actions and beliefs on assumptions that just
aren’t true… for example, this notion of change… the
average conservative believes as Machiavelli did
that human beings are fixed and set in who they are from
birth… that change isn’t possible for human beings,
a “leopard can’t change its spots” is one way of saying this…
but we do change our spots, I am not the same person I was
when I was 2 or 22 or 42… I changed because my situation,
my environment changed… and I must change to be able to
survive and prosper at whatever age I am… what works at
12 doesn’t work at 22 or 32 or 62… and if I were to act and think
as I did at even 42, I wouldn’t be able to adapt and change to my
new conditions…

but the conservative hasn’t been able to overcome their
childhood indoctrinations, their “education” and those assumptions
of childhood, that the USA is the greatest country on earth, is not
examined… it is assumed… and conservatives act and think
on those unchallenged assumptions… they act as if there is a god,
but that is an assumption and for most people, it is an
unchallenged assumption… of course, there is a god, because
I was taught that as a child… why should I think or believe any
differently?

you believe that because you haven’t challenged it or you
haven’t overcome it…I have wrestled with the idea of god
for decades… and wrestle is the right word…
I have overcome that childhood notion of their being a god
and I make no assumptions that begin with this notion of
their being a god… whereas the conservative starts their
examination of the world with that base belief of their being
a god… the idea of god is baked into their beliefs of existence…
it is accepted and thus becomes part of the landscape of what
they believe in… when they look at the universe, it is assumed
that god is part of the universe… and thus they get a warped
perspective of existence because they hold to assumptions
which warped their beliefs… in other words, their preconceived
notions are the base of their understanding of the world…
if you wear rose colored glasses all your life, everything has
a rose colored tint… and until you take off your glasses,
and see the universe without those rose colored glasses,
you will get a biased, partisan viewpoint of the universe…
if your assumptions is biased toward a belief in god, then
you will see god everywhere in the universe…
and all your actions are based on an unproven bias…

to get an unbiased viewpoint of the universe, one needs to start
with an unbiased, not prejudice view or understanding
of the universe we live in…to start with a bias or prejudice
viewpoint of the universe leads one to a biased
or prejudice view…remove the assumptions and see
the universe clearly…

Kropotkin