[empath75]

How important is it for you to know that the world is round? What would change in your life, if you didn't know that seemingly important fact? How about that homeopathic medicine is a fraud, or that global warming is man made or that vaccines don't cause autism? If you were wrong about all of those things, what changes about your life right away? That's why people don't exercise critical thinking. It just doesn't matter if you know the truth about things, for most people, most of the time. (Until it does, of course, and you die of cancer because you tried to pray it away instead of getting chemo).

[mattnewton]

All of those things actively affect others' wellbeing when put into public policy. And a democracy gives the masses the ability to put those beliefs in public policy.

Would it affect you tight away? No, but in a Generation our children contract more disease, less of them go into stem fields because of the distrust and dissonance that has been spread, and the air your children breath becomes more polluted.

[nine_k]

The belief that a particular quack medicine is effective may have cost Steve Jobs many years of life.