Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Self-Deception

A great article from The Skeptic's Dictionary  about self self-deception. Confirmation bias is something that we all have a tendency for. And knowing this, we should be forewarned so that we will make a concerted effort to nullify this tendency in our search for truth:
Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept claims about ourselves as true or valid when they are false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs about ourselves to ourselves.
When philosophers and psychologists discuss self-deception, they usually focus on unconscious motivations and intentions. They also usually consider self-deception as a bad thing, something to guard against. To explain how self-deception works, they focus on self-interest, prejudice, desire, insecurity, and other psychological factors unconsciously affecting in a negative way the will to believe. A common example would be that of a parent who believes his child is telling the truth even though the objective evidence strongly supports the claim that the child is lying. The parent, it is said, deceives him or herself into believing the child because the parent desires that the child tell the truth. A belief so motivated is usually considered more flawed than one due to lack of ability to evaluate evidence properly. The former is considered to be a kind of moral flaw, a kind of dishonesty, and irrational. The latter is considered to be a matter of fate: some people are just not gifted enough to make proper inferences from the data of perception and experience.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Garden Of Eden Myth And The "Messiah"

A comment by Farrell Till from the II Errancy discussion list, 11-29-06:

TILL
What we have here is just another spin that NT writers put
on an OT text to make it appear that the Jewish scriptures
pointed to the coming of Jesus. Jewish literature itself,
however, indicated that the Garden of Eden yarn was
intended as nothing more than an explanation of traditional
concerns like why is survival such a struggle, why do
snakes crawl instead of walking on legs, why are people
almost universally afraid of snakes, and why is childbirth
so painful? The answers are in the Garden of Eden myth. God
pronounced curses on all parties involved in the first
"sin." The man was doomed to have to earn his living by
the sweat of his brow tilling land that brings forth thorns
and thistles, the serpent was condemned to crawl on its
belly and eat the dust of the earth, enmity between the
seeds of the serpent and the woman was decreed (the one
would bruise the heel of the seed of the woman; the other
would bruise the head of the seed of the serpent), and
women would bring forth offspring in pain.

See Josephus's Antiquities 1:1,4 (49-51). When humans encounter 
snakes, they risk being bitten [on the heel], so their first inclination is to kill the snake, usually by crushing its head. Christians have distorted a myth, intended to explain puzzling aspects of life, into some mystical prophecy of their Messiah.

As I have previously asked, is there anything sillier than
theological assumptions?