Sunday, September 16, 2012

“True Believers” are a serious problem in this country


“True Believers” are a serious problem in this country.  The American public is beset by a plethora of irrational delusions that are widely believed. 

“True Believers” cling to their delusional paradigms with the same obsession that Silas Marner clung to his gold, all the while denying the validity of any other viewpoint.  

Both religion and science suffer from the same narrow-minded belligerence.

For example, consider this comparison test of scientific thinking skills between separate groups of Ph.D. scientists and Protestant Ministers.

They were advised that “science” had already determined the “four correct” (there were actually more than four) solutions to a given problem.   Both groups were given ample time to construct rules governing the behavior of certain variables. 
1.    The Ministers conducted three times as many experiments before they offered an answer.
2.    The ministers were only half as likely to return an answer that had already been disproved. 
3.    The ministers were three times slower in venturing to offer their first hypothesis. 
4.    The ministers found twice as many acceptable solutions to the problem as the scientists. 

In other words, the Ministers were more “scientific” in their thinking than the Ph.D. scientists. 

It seems the scientists were indoctrinated with their own brand of dogma in their own “religion” and the ministers were liberated from their usual intellectual orthodoxy by being thrown into an unfamiliar arena.

Would you want to bet that if the subject had been theology the scientists would have been more creative in their thinking than most clergy?

Revs. Sam and Bunny Sewell
Church Without Walls

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