About a year ago, I visited The Journey, a new church in my neighborhood. You can see that post here. Although I felt like a “misfit” at The Journey (because I don’t believe in the literal truth of any of the miraculous claims of the Bible) I reveled in the…
Al Jazeera (yes, Al Jazeera) has taken the time to interview some of the Ohio voters who are driven by bigotry and ignorance. No doubt there are many others. Now it's time for the mainstream corporate media to do the same, to shame these people into silence. Sunshine is a…
I’m traveling back home after spending an incredibly quiet and stress-free five days on Nantucket. For those of you who are not familiar, Nantucket, part of Massachusetts, is an island in the Atlantic Ocean. October is the off-peak season on Nantucket, meaning that the Island is much quieter than it is during the summer. This week, I was able to experience the perfect storm of quietude. While the entire island was relatively devoid of people because of the season, I was utterly, almost sinfully, able to spend my five days in an especially quiet corner of Nantucket, in a beach house owned by my wife’s family. I was the only person occupying the house. My wife urged me to go, to get away from “everything.” My co-workers at work were equally generous with their encouragement and support.
I truly did “get away from it all.” The sun and the moon were my only clocks. I spent my time reading, writing, walking on beaches, shooting photos, eating simple fun food (can of chili, anyone), beach-combing, enjoying the 60 degree daytime high, not shaving, playing the guitar, staring at the horizon, staring at the horizon again, listening to the waves, and watching the seagulls sail by. Although I did quite a bit of reading and writing (which I also do at home), I had long uninterrupted stretches of time in which to do this work, rather fighting for an hour or two here and there. I had my own desk where I …
This experiment has been done repeatedly in psychology experiments. It's always entertaining. What's amazing is that the switched questioner has such a different physical appearance and voice.
Consider these words of George W. Bush, spoken in Rome, in 2001
“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.”
This is not an isolated case. These sorts of fact-free assertions occur all the time. Consider another example, this one a hypothetical. Assume that you overhear some guy claiming that homeopathic medicine [or fill in the blank with your own favorite snake oil treatment] is effective and powerful. Because you suspect that he doesn’t have his facts right or that his reasoning is unreliable or invalid, you speak up and question his statement. He responds by saying something like the following:
I’m certain I am correct. I’m absolutely sure that I’m right. I have no doubts about this.
Despite the many claims of certainty that we hear, we often remain unconvinced, and for good reason. There’s a saying, “Show, don’t tell.” Show me the facts so that I myself can see whether I am certain. Don’t just tell me that you’re certain. Nonetheless, people constantly make claims that are based on inner feels of certainty, quite often wild and unsubstantiated claims about politics and religion, as well as claims about science, history or just about everything else.
People often use such claims that they have a “feeling of certainty” as bootstraps to convince themselves that they are even more certain than they actually are, thereby completely dispensing for the need for meticulous …