(February 28, 2014 at 8:42 am)JesusLover1 Wrote: I SWEAR ON MY LIFE THIS HAPPENED.
Why would you swear on your life about something of which you have no direct knowledge, only a story your parents told you?
You've ruled out the the doctors may have been wrong about your brother's prognosis. Why? Do you think doctors are perfect?
You've ruled out that your parents may have embellished the story over the years, something that tends to happen even without any intent to lie. Why? Do you think your parents are perfect?
Anecdotes are barely evidence, and hearsay anecdotes are even worse. It's okay. You've never been taught how to evaluate evidence. The reason you've never been taught that is that it would let you figure out for yourself the likelihood of a story being true. Your parents do NOT want you to have this skill, because they intuitively understand that a lot of what they're teaching you can't stand up to that kind of evaluation, and they value you believing what they do more than they value you being able to evaluate truth claims. This is because they believe you'll burn in hell if they don't do a good job of making you believe you'll burn in hell if you don't believe them.
It's a sort of infection of the mind. Critical thinking skills are like security software that let you clean bad code out of your system and prevent more from getting in.
