The human mind appears to have evolved in a tribal system, and it appears to be predisposed to tribal thinking. As for myself, I try to think of my tribe as all

The human mind appears to have evolved in a tribal system, and it appears to be predisposed to tribal thinking. As for myself, I try to think of my tribe as all of humanity. You're all my cousins; some of you are knuckleheads, some of you are dangerous, but you're all my cousins. I like the book "The Righteous Mind". It took me a month to read; it's emotionally difficult, not intellectually difficult. You can't blame people for their gender or skin tone; you also can't blame them for how they were raised - people pick up deeply held beliefs as children that are very hard to see or address. > What I find really scary is that I have hard time understanding if I am just fooling myself or being rational. Because it’s always my own mind coming up with explanations, so the actual process looks the same to me. The mind is a rationalizing system. It makes things you do feel rational. After I left organized religion, I fell in love with rational skepticism. Then I found that most public "skepticism" is just debunking, not gathering evidence for things you should believe in; and that most "rationality" is just post-hoc rationalization of existing beliefs.