Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything for its own sake are not interested in other things. Finding the truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough.
Ibn al-Haytham
A key figure in development of the scientific method.
[I mention this because I suspected an anti-gun person was completely clueless as to how to distinguish truth from falsity. I was right. It is a very, very common problem–especially among anti-gun people. Asking them to explain how they determine what is true from false gets a blank stare and/or indignation without a valid response every single time I have tried it.
I was going to use a couple paragraphs from this article for the QOTD but Jeff bet me to it.–Joe]
Wow. Not only did you walk him into admitting that he has no clue how to tell if something is factual or not, but you also showed him exactly how you were going to do it, and he still walked right into it.
I am undoubtedly impressed that you were finally able to get such an admission out of it, but I still feel some amount of pity for MikeB in general. Someone that far gone will not understand the admission he made, nor will he make any attempt to correct it. At least we have it for the record, now…
Like I said, it’s a very common problem. I used to blame it on theism because of the faith requirement for their belief system. But I had to drop that hypothesis because of all the atheist liberals who suffered from the same mental deficit. I am now inclined to believe it is general problem of the human condition. Some (most?) people simply do not, and perhaps cannot, understand that there are absolute truths which are empirically discoverable. And that furthermore these truths are independent of how firmly, or how many, people believe something to the contrary.
I’m reminded of this quote but that is a little more harsh than I care to be today.
I dunno, Joe. while Mike and many other illogical anti-gunners are not “theist” when it comes to this issue, the games they play and thier insistance of reasoned discourse, hand-picked facts, and worship of the anti-gun lobby certainly point to the aspects of religion more than ideology.
The same can be said about a lot of political causes that have been proven ad nausium in the laboratory of the world. Socialism/Socialized services, Global Warming/ Whatever term they invent to cover their tracks, to gay marriage, faith-based education, abstiance-only sex-ed. (A nice bi-partisan list to be fair)
Some people just want their pet cause to be right, no matter how many times its been proven wrong. That takes nothing short of blind faith.