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You’re coming to the exact opposite, wrong conclusions here. 1) in the trust-Bush example, anyone who actually, properly learned “how to sense when other peopl

You’re coming to the exact opposite, wrong conclusions here. 1) in the trust-Bush example, anyone who actually, properly learned “how to sense when other people have a depth of knowledge or experience that is unavailable to you” would have sensed that Bush was full of shit, didn’t know what he was doing, and was a terrible person to have in charge. Honing that skill is incredibly valuable in life, precisely because it protects you from having to blindly trust anyone based on a claim (accurate or not) that they know what they're doing. 2) This is not theology at all. Theology is about accepting a claim despite your inability to rationalize it, or accepting it precisely because your ability to rationalize it is broken or flawed—and both being in the realm of deities. What erikpukinskis was describing is the process of cultivating empathy and trust, in face of the acknowledgement that your perceived reality is not necessarily accurate (which it isn’t for anyone on the planet). He's saying that there are a lot of smart people who simply cannot believe that “something” is truly happening if they have no personal experience with that “something”, and may, as a result, deny the reality that is that “something”. And he’s saying that, for him at least, it was necessary to learn to accept these things as true, first, before being able to figure out and rationalize them on his own, later, without having to be personally exposed to the problem for it. And that’s called empathy, not theology.

philwelch 14y ago
Theology is what happens when you accept a claim first and try to rationalize it second. Perhaps apologetics is a better term. In any case, I find it profoundly backwards. Being able to entertain a claim is important, vitally so, but just as long as you're able to hold off accepting it. As for Bush, it's factually true that he did have a depth of knowledge that was unavailable to me. What was harder to tell was whether he was using it correctly. Perhaps you have a telepathic sense of whether or not people are correctly using the information they have access to; perhaps you don't, but confirmation bias gives you the persistent illusion that you do. I'll just close by saying that I don't claim to know very much at all more than provisionally--I'm willing to have my understanding updated based on new information, and I'm comfortable with people coming to different conclusions from different sets of information. What I'm not willing to do is grant other people write access to my beliefs based upon my emotional estimate of their credibility.

philwelch 14y ago

Theology is what happens when you accept a claim first and try to rationalize it second. Perhaps apologetics is a better term. In any case, I find it profoundly backwards. Being able to entertain a claim is important, vitally so, but just as long as you're able to hold off accepting it. As for Bush, it's factually true that he did have a depth of knowledge that was unavailable to me. What was harder to tell was whether he was using it correctly. Perhaps you have a telepathic sense of whether or not people are correctly using the information they have access to; perhaps you don't, but confirmation bias gives you the persistent illusion that you do. I'll just close by saying that I don't claim to know very much at all more than provisionally--I'm willing to have my understanding updated based on new information, and I'm comfortable with people coming to different conclusions from different sets of information. What I'm not willing to do is grant other people write access to my beliefs based upon my emotional estimate of their credibility.