“It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” and “The scientist hasn’t taken the gnomes away, only taken my delusion away,” ”
The problem, I fear, is that the vast majority of people are simply not that strong of mind, or, to put it another way, they have little regard for intellectual honesty. This isn’t really surprising, because by lying to yourself about certain facts of life, you can make yourself feel better. And feeling happy is what is most important to most people. I see a lot of clever people (Michael Anissimov had a post critiquing Christianity a few days ago) trying to persuade people to drop their irrational beliefs using logical arguments (this applies to all sorts of irrational beliefs—re-incarnation, belief in “souls”, etc). It doesn’t work! Why? Because people don’t want to feel depressed about life!
To make it easier for intellectually honest, rational people to understand why rational argument won’t work, imagine this: I put you in a brain scanner, and tell you that for every true belief I find in you head, I will torture you for a day. Believing important true things—like acknowledging that human life is a material, physical phenomenon—get extra long periods of torture. You get “credit” (torture sessions subtracted off) for adopting a religion, with extra credit given for the really implausible religions, like fundamentalist/creationist/young earth Christianity.
To discover this, replace “gnome” with “god” in the quote above, and go talk to some Christians.
“It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” and “The scientist hasn’t taken the gnomes away, only taken my delusion away,” ”
The problem, I fear, is that the vast majority of people are simply not that strong of mind, or, to put it another way, they have little regard for intellectual honesty. This isn’t really surprising, because by lying to yourself about certain facts of life, you can make yourself feel better. And feeling happy is what is most important to most people. I see a lot of clever people (Michael Anissimov had a post critiquing Christianity a few days ago) trying to persuade people to drop their irrational beliefs using logical arguments (this applies to all sorts of irrational beliefs—re-incarnation, belief in “souls”, etc). It doesn’t work! Why? Because people don’t want to feel depressed about life!
To make it easier for intellectually honest, rational people to understand why rational argument won’t work, imagine this: I put you in a brain scanner, and tell you that for every true belief I find in you head, I will torture you for a day. Believing important true things—like acknowledging that human life is a material, physical phenomenon—get extra long periods of torture. You get “credit” (torture sessions subtracted off) for adopting a religion, with extra credit given for the really implausible religions, like fundamentalist/creationist/young earth Christianity.
To discover this, replace “gnome” with “god” in the quote above, and go talk to some Christians.