Comments on: Review: Why People Believe Weird Things

By: the chaplain

the chaplain — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:42:56 +0000

This book is on my to-buy-soon list. Thanks for the review.

By: yunshui

yunshui — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:40:44 +0000

I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, so thanks for the review – gives me a bit of an incentive to shift Mr Shermer up my reading pile.

By: Eshu

Eshu — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:50:27 +0000

2-D Man,

That’s an interesting story, have you described it in detail anywhere? I think it would be great to see how a smart Christian can change their mind.

OT: I think this is your first post, although I’ve seen you around elsewhere. The live preview runs locally in JavaScript, and seems pretty instantaneous to me. So either your browser is slower on JavaScript or something else is going wrong. Perhaps you just type much faster than I do!

By: 2-D Man

2-D Man — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:43:20 +0000

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Yeah, I’ve done that. On my own I developed the same ideas that entire Christian apologetics books have been written about. Then I went to a couple of atheist websites only to find out that these books had been printed and subsequently debunked or taken to…unpleasant logical conclusions that hadn’t occurred to me. It was a bit disencouraging, but I realised that my not-so-cherished beliefs were, at the very least, unreasonable. So I gave them up entirely.

OT: It’s been quite a while since I commented here (if I ever have). Those open/close tags buttons are really slick, but the preview handles slowly. (Which might be a good thing, as it forces people to slow down a little as they type.)