(July 8, 2016 at 3:15 am)robvalue Wrote: It does make total sense to me that theists would more readily believe other irrational/superstitious/woo things than atheists. If you've succumbed to one form of magical irrational thinking, you're more vulnerable to more of it. After all, you already have one foot across the divide between reality and fantasy. You can't very easily question all these other things without having to evaluate where your foot is.
That's another reason I'm so against indoctrination. It erodes a person's grip on reality, to a lesser or greater extent. At least that appears to be the case.
Well, conpartmentalization works funny. The same believers who adore a god reject often vehemently the idea of other life in the Universe, for instance -- not that that's woo (because we don't know, yet), but believers reject it because it reduces the specialness of the human race.
And in the mind of the theist, oftentimes, the primacy of human specialness in the eyes of god(s) trumps the woo on offer from UFOlogist etc.
As you said already, the dataset is incomplete. But depending on what phenomenon you're exploring, the primacy of belief can trump it; I think the real question in the mind of the True Believer is "does this go against my core belief?"
And that is compartmentalization in a nutshell. They're very able to summon rational arguments against other forms of woo, not because they're committed to rationality, but because it threatens a worldview they hold dear.
