Really? It is just another “magical” and imaginary creature… there is no logical contradiction involved in it.
The tooth fairy hypothesis posits that your teeth are taken from under your pillow by a magical creature. Given that your teeth are not taken from under your pillow by a magical creature, but rather your parents, this hypothesis is false.
Sorry to ruin it for you.
Oh, please. Not another “
argumentum ad numeram”.
Getting very boring. An overwhelming percentage of the people never even thinks about their core belief system. It does not mean that they are “stupid”, they simply swallow whatever was dished out to them in their childhood years. The also huge percentage of the rest (who actually think about it) are pretty shallow thinkers. The remaining tiny percentage generally turned into atheists.
(Kidding, but only a little).
It appears that you’ve swallowed a rather large amount of nonsensical anti-religion propaganda to support your core belief system - which I have to ask if you’ve ever thought about. (Note that rebelling does not count as thought.) But note that I never said you must believe because lots of smart people did, I said it was silly to say that the arguments were obviously stupid because the vast majority of people don’t think so. If they’re wrong, it must necessarily, by the definition of obvious, not be obvious.
Aquinas, Augustine, Albert the Great, Descartes, Pascal… The list goes on. It is extremely silly, an equivalent of sticking your head in the sand, to say that these people either didn’t think about their core belief system (demonstrably false) or became atheists (demonstrably false), and it is beyond silly to wave away their arguments as silly and obviously incoherent because you don’t like them.
And it is crazy to assume that everyone will agree with your assessment that worldviews contrary to your own or obviously stupid when the majority of people hold a world view contrary to your own.
**
Short version: if you think an idea is wrong, argue that it is, don’t just smugly wave your hands and say that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is supporting logical absurdities. **
If you consider that the catechism and the dogmas (which were written by relatively educated people) also contains very serious logical fallacies then the whole problem becomes alarming. To posit logical absurdities is unpardonable.
Yeah, you saw that Catholic up by my handle, I’m sure, and I’m also sure you noticed the “Catholic” between “forums.” and “.com”. If you didn’t, please check those places again.
Now that you have that information, hold it firmly in your mind and consider what you just said.
Obviously, if you’re going to say that Catholicism is full of logical fallacies here, you can’t expect people just to nod along with you.
I find it pretty hilarious that you expected that to fly here. Clearly you cannot expect the “if you consider” part of this statement to hold in general terms, given where you are.
Of course all this is a sidetrack. You presented that one is able to “self-brainwash” oneself into believeing something that was unbelievable. So, there is your task: “try to talk yourself that sand has a lot of nutritional value, and you can sustain your life on eating sand alone”. Or that you are able to levitate by sheer force of will, and try to put it into practice once you are REALLY convinced that it is possible… As they say, the “proof of the pudding is that it is edible”. Go and prove what you stated.
It’s been proved. I’ve given you examples. People do it all the time. Generally self deception to assuage guilt. I imagine you’ve done it yourself, most people have, and could find an example of it if you examined your conscious for a bit.
But it’s not limited to self deception or the convincing oneself of logically unbelievable either. Works for arguments that a person intellectually discovers are valid, but thinks in his gut are wrong. Happens in conversion stories all the time, a person decides that a religion is true (or false), but is so used to thinking of it as false (or true) that his gut feeling disagrees. But because he’s decided that it is, he behaves as though it is, and then eventually the gut comes around. Gut feeling, while useful and not to be ignored lightly, is not always logical.
Heck, it even happens in math and physics classes. Some weird result of the math and the explanations seems totally off the wall, but you accept it anyway because you know it’s true and work with it, and as you work with it while accepting that it is true, the off-the-wall-ness fades and it appears normal.
