28Apr10 A Series of Experiments 1: Respect
By: Barry Belmont

+ Incorrect beliefs should not be respected.

+ People should be given the benefit of the doubt and respected as such until they give sufficient reasons not to be respected anymore.

+ Beliefs are intricately tied to “who” a person is. In other words, “who you are” is quite correlated to “what you believe.”

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Google Bookmarks
View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in A Series of Experiments
Tagged ,
  • Jacob K

    Who decides what an incorrect belief is?

    What is sufficient reason?

    Who a person is, is tied to what they do, not what they believe. Just because an individual believes he is superman doesn't make him superman.

  • http://unrforliberty.com Barry Belmont

    You seem to be playing the fool. Are you implying there is no such thing as an incorrect belief? Are you insinuating that there is no such thing as sufficient reason?

    If that were the case I could say you are a smelly baboon-looking person with poor mathematical abilities, fourteen heads, green eyes, hair made of razor wire, and skin the color of cherry Jello and I wouldn't be wrong.

    Are you also suggesting that beliefs are completely divorced from what a person does? Such that suicide bombers' belief in an afterlife has nothing whatsoever to do with it? Or that my particular belief in the importance of holding opinions that correspond to reality having absolutely nothing to do with my reason for disagreeing with you?

    I sincerely hope you don't think these things. But if you don't, I'm a bit puzzled by your point in asking these questions? I may not have a twenty or fifty or forty-thousand word long response to something as massive as “what is sufficient reason?” but we can quite easily see that there is such a thing is insufficient reasons for belief and sufficient reasons.

    There are sufficient reasons for me to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. There are insufficient reasons for me to believe that next Tuesday aliens will arrive and name me king of the galaxy and award me with a PS3, and a spaceship in the shape of a pirate ship made entirely of goal.

    Yes, there is a continuum on which we can wax continually about where exactly grey changes colors, but that does not mean that there aren't shades of grey that aren't dark enough to be considered black.

    Black and white do exist, that is all I am claiming. I am not saying I know where exactly the border is, nor am I suggesting that grey does not exist. Simply that black and white are real things.

  • Jacob K

    “Are you implying there is no such thing as an incorrect belief?”

    Quite the contrary, I am simply questioning one individuals ability to deem another individuals believe incorrect.

    “Are you insinuating that there is no such thing as sufficient reason?”

    You seem very set on defining things to have absolute thresholds. The world is not 1s and 0s.

    “Are you also suggesting that beliefs are completely divorced from what a person does?”

    No, I'm simply pointing out that people can believe on thing and act in a completely different fashion.

    “Such that suicide bombers' belief in an afterlife has nothing whatsoever to do with it?”

    From your use of this example I assume, possibly incorrectly, that you do not believe in an afterlife. How about the example of another individual who believes in an afterlife and attempts to do as many “good deeds” as possible to get in to heaven, and works to help hundreds of poor children in Africa learn to read. Her belief and motivating force may have been incorrect, but shouldn't she as a person be respected?

    “Black and white do exist, that is all I am claiming.”

    This is the point were I disagree, there is no such thing as black and white; only varying shades of gray.

blog comments powered by Disqus