By Joel Bowman, on July 14th, 2014% I recently had two online exchanges with “True Believers.” In my case, both were Christian “literalists” whose “true belief” was in Biblical inerrancy, believing that the Christian Bible is literally the “Word of God” and therefore contains no errors. The belief in inerrancy is more complex than the phrase implies, as there are so many different versions of the ancient texts. My concern is with inerrancy in general rather than which particular form it takes.
Christians aren’t the only ones who have an inerrancy faction. Muslims have one, too. Sunnis and Shia are currently in the news for their . . . → Read More: True Believers
By Joel Bowman, on October 5th, 2013% According to a top Saudi cleric, driving damages women’s ovaries. Does the fact (reality) that some people believe that make it true, if only for them? What—exactly—is the relationship between reality and what we believe? You may know people who believe that their beliefs accurately reflect reality. If you’ve been reading this blog for very long, you know that one of my recurrent themes is the need for an evidence procedure that allows individuals to base their beliefs on reality to the degree that it’s possible.
It was, for example, perfectly logical for our ancient ancestors to believe that . . . → Read More: The Reality of Beliefs
By Joel Bowman, on April 15th, 2012%
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In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post (Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently.), Chris Mooney addressed some of the reasons the differences between liberals and conservatives have become so acrimonious over the past few election cycles. According to Mooney, “There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information . . . → Read More: Possibilities and Necessities
By Joel Bowman, on April 5th, 2011% Richard Bandler, who has often been called “the best hypnotist in the world,” is fond of saying, “Hypnosis isn’t the exception…. It’s the rule.” The fact is that people—you, me, and everyone—tend to be in one trance or another most of the time. It is more a matter of which trance you are in rather than whether you are in trance. What we think of as “normal consciousness” is just one kind of trance with a particular set of beliefs.
The more neuroscientists examine the way the human mind works, the more they discover that unconscious processes—processes operating below . . . → Read More: The Secret of Hypnosis
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