You Can Believe What Is Untrue and Disbelieve What Is True

Mary Ann tweeted a link that led to a fascinating site about faith, belief, and scientific thought. For Richard Dawkins "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence".




This is an argument that has to swim against a tide of thought that argues that to have faith is good because of the very fact that it is irrational. Well someone clever came up with that dead end rebuttal. I fear lack of open mindedness. I fear ideas that are resist counter evidence. I fear dogma. Reading on from the link that Mary Ann posted I thought the following quote from Craig Lee Duckett was worth posting.

"Beliefs oftentime give the appearance of pleasure and peace, because beliefs are almost always personalsubjective and don't push back. People typically believe in those things that make them happy, alleviate their fears, give them hope, and promise to fulfill their wishes and dreams. Life-after-death, living in eternal Paradise with your loved ones, seventy-two virgins, inheriting a vibrant young 'spiritual' body, all knowledge revealed, seeing wicked people get theirs'—these are just some of the things that motivatetempting, the endings neat and tidy. Seeking truth and knowledge, on the other hand, typically produces the opposite effect by eventually uncovering the self-deception and denial underlying most untested belief systems "

20% Of Americans Wrongly Believe Obama Is A Muslim

How ironic. 20% of Americans 'believe' that Obama is a Muslim. Belief is a curious thing. One in Five Americans are too lazy to be bothered to find out the facts. To get the evidence. They would rather depend on belief rather than data. A fifth of Americans are playing a tit for tat faith game. They presume Obama's faith is Muslim when he is a Christian. They believe that Obama's faith isn't as 'good' as their 'faith'. They believe he has the wrong faith. This is a problem with faith. It requires you to believe without any evidence. When such thinking seeps into the ordinary everyday ways of the world rather than staying in the meta-physical place where such thinking belongs then we have trouble. There is an equivalence in ignorance here between this 20% and the Taliban who 'believe' that their beliefs should direct day to day affairs. This 20% lack of intellectual sophistication translates into a huge number of ignorant people.

This is worrying. Why are they content to 'believe' rather than put effort into getting the facts? Perhaps its because so much of their life, it's meaning and it's purpose is prepared like a 'ready meal' for them to consume by Big Media and Big Business. With yet more irony, what more evidence is needed for evolution! The brain skill of researching for evidence, analysis, synthesis and placing of meaning has been de-selected. An evolutionary branch that has no need to 'gather evidence' has started in 20% of the population of the USA. In a couple of hundred years they will become a sub (sic) species of human. Unable to understand information, incapable of thinking for themselves, reliant on rote and routine to get them from waking to sleeping.  The Washington Post  report on the survey should worry anyone who thinks deeper than foam on a Starbuck's cappuccino.