A Question For Those In The Know

[Angrboda]

Even Joseph Smith, the man who conned thousands into believing his made up Mormon religion, believed his own bullshit.

I disagree. I think Smith was a fraud who knew he was a fraud and discovered early on that being a confidence trickster was easier than working for a living.

I think it's possible for both to be true. To my eye, to be human is to be constantly deceived, not so much by others as by ourselves.

It's a fairly common complaint where people collide over religious belief to become convinced that the people on the other side are either "lunatic, liar, or loser." Whether it's atheists assessing theists, theists assessing atheists, Democrats assessing Republicans, or what have you. I believe the tendency to frame things this way, and to become convinced that someone who believes dramatically differently than you do in such terms, is just an artifact of the way the brain processes things. It's a combination of a couple of things. First, a naive model of cognition which says that people have the capacity to be aware of things equally, and that people, unless they intentionally deny or blind themselves, have reasonably good access to what they think and why they think it. The second is the mechanisms for resolving cognitive dissonance, which can even go so far as to rewrite memory or create memories that never occurred.

In schematic, the average person holds the following beliefs:
1. I'm a reasonable person.
2. Failing specific evidence otherwise, most other people are reasonable.
3. Reasonable people believe reasonable things.
4. I as an X'er believe 'X'.
5. That person, as a Y'er believes 'not X'.

However, these beliefs are not mutually consistent. If reasonable people believe reasonable things, and other people are reasonable, then 'not X' must be reasonable; but I'm reasonable and I believe the opposite, so how can that also be true?

The mind is generally less concerned about truth than it is about maintaining a consistent worldview, and in order to make the set of beliefs consistent, one of them has to go. Usually it's the assumption that the other person is reasonable (and not a liar, lunatic, or loser).

I'm no different than anyone else. I know this and believe this, yet I still find myself coming to the conclusion that so-and-so is an idiot or a liar, though I recognize that is likely an illusion, caused by the way the human mind works. But I can't shake the feeling that they are! (I guess it just goes to show that our biases are stronger than we are.)