(October 8, 2015 at 4:04 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(October 8, 2015 at 3:03 pm)Drich Wrote: If you were truly honest with yourself you could apply Each and every one of these thing to why people don't believe as well.
An excellent point.
That's almost the perfect definition of Skepticism as a way of thinking. We do apply those to ourselves, as a constant error-checking method. To us, it is a compliment to point out an error in thinking, or a mistake of fact, to a fellow atheist.
It's a little shocking to us, then, when we do the same as we do for one another to a fundamentalist who comes here, and they react to our information with hostility or silence, pretending we did not demonstrate what we did.
It's the source of the term "intellectual honesty", being willing to recognize when our intellects can fool us, and make the necessary corrections. We are just as capable of those errors as anyone; the difference is in how we prefer to apply the recognition of such errors in revision of our beliefs the moment it becomes clear that we have swallowed something based upon fallacious reasoning or bias.
Dogma is the precise opposite of that.
Number 4 is hard at work...
