On 10/19/2010 9:41 AM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>>    Seldom have I seen a person strongly believing in one type of pseudoscience
>>> or supernatural phenomena, and adamantly denying the existence of another,
>
>> Well, other than organized religion. :-)  I know lots of devout religious
>> people who don't believe in any other religion's supernatural phenomena and
>> who don't believe in UFOs or other conspiracy theories.
>
>    I'm not so sure of that. I suppose it depends a lot on the movement inside
> the religion, the local church/congregation and the individual person.
>
>    Many religious people are quite predisposed to accept the existence of
> all kinds of supernatural phenomena which are not part of the teachings
> of their own religion. They simply state that it's the work of Satan (or
> whatever antagonist the religion might have).
>
>    There are also many movements of eg. Christianity where the people are
> quite predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories, such as Freemasons
> being a NWO secret cult which is secretly pulling the strings behind the
> scenes and are aiming at total world domination. (And all this simply
> because someone *told* them that.)
>
Which is my point. You can't conclude that there are theists which 
accept their own, but reject others. This doesn't even happen, 
necessarily, among non-theists. Rather, its creating false categories. 
Everything that they accept which is absurd, but I don't know about is 
in category A, but since category B seems to be empty, I have no reason 
to presume category A either. Basic psychology should present grounds 
for category A (and its near infinite collection of things you don't 
know they believe), while B is simply a subset of those, which you *may 
have* considered bringing up at one time or another, when talking with them.

Darren's assertion is one I find implausible, based on the fact that 
even I catch myself still thinking some things may be reasonable, due to 
insufficient reason to reject them, and lack of care in questioning. 
Claiming, on the other hand, that theists are, generally, far more 
likely to fall prey to these sorts of errors is supported both by their 
initial error, the prevalence of those that do hold multiple categories 
of woo, *and* the fact that even those that reject almost all of them, 
including religion, still fall prey to such mistakes, in some cases.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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