Fool me twice . . . rethink your approach to truth

https://homeupgradespecialist.com/x8u69bfo3 Yesterday I quoted from a book by a priest whom I know. In it he said:

https://inteligencialimite.org/2024/08/07/8ie98gxspr Let me submit to you, therefore, that the great spiritual battle of our time is not a struggle between believers and atheists. Rather, it is a struggle between pride and humility. We expect and even demand humility in almost all other areas of life–what really matters is what is objectively true, not what any of us might happen to think is true.

https://eloquentgushing.com/2fqnoyoxrt

Part of the reason we are so often fooled, as a society, is that we have largely given up a search for what is objectively true. What do I mean? For centuries, people have known that truth can have more than one look to it. That is why there are 12 people on a jury, and for felony crimes, they are required to agree together. Because of possible bias, all proceedings to empanel a jury have to include the fair possibility of selecting men or women, and people from differenct ethnic and religious backgrounds. In many states, opposition to capital punishment does not necessarily disqualify a juror from serving on a capital crime jury, as it is thought that even that viewpoint can provide some needed balance and discourse in the jury room.

https://polyploid.net/blog/?p=n7our37  In other words, the possibility of bias in the reporting of events and in their interpretation not only has been well known, but techniques were developed to minimize it as possible. Juries of 12 people was one technique. The development of the scientific method, with its requirement for replication and peer review is another technique, and so on. That the techniques were not perfect was also well known, that is why laws are changed as necessary in order to have fairer juries, and the procedures for the verification of scientific findings have become more rigorous over the centuries. That same approach has also been followed in several other fields of endeavor.

https://solomedicalsupply.com/2024/08/07/t4d61bu Also, for many years, the misapplication of findings have been well known. That is why the saying developed that statistics do not lie, but liars use statistics. Moreover, two fields in particular have always been known as fields in which it is somewhat doubted that its practitioners are actually interested in truth. Those two fields are lawyers and politicians. There are woodcuts and watercolors mocking lawyers and politicians that date back centuries. And, sadly, clergy have come in for their share of doubt as to their truthfulness, and not simply from atheists and agnostics. Both Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales picture at least some of the clergy and monastics in rather unflattering lights. Sadly, the recent events with Harold Camping, who is now predicting that he miscalculated and it will really be in October, only add to this view of the clergy.

https://foster2forever.com/2024/08/frx7xlpy11.html So, how did we get in this mess in which shouting heads on TV can make it seem as though everything is to be doubted? For instance, despite the recurrent studies which have now well disproven the autism/childhood vaccines linkage, one can still see websites that swear that it is true and it has now become yet another of the conspiracy theories which bedevil USA culture. Well, there are several facets that have gone into a severe loss of the concept of truth in this society. Among them are some studies in the philosophy of science that date to the early 20th century, the realization by philosophers that “modernist” versions of truth were inadequate thus leading to “post-modernism”, the increasing understanding that some viewpoints had been shut out of the national conversation, and the wholesale adoption by this culture not only of a watered-down inadequate understanding of what post-modernism was saying, but also the adoption by many of even the most conservative of Christians within the culture of methods of argumentation that would have drawn scorn from those writers who were involved in writing the early Fundamentals (from which comes the term fundamentalism) at the beginning of the 20th century.

https://mandikaye.com/blog/sjuzztqj ===MORE TO COME===