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Showing results for tags 'dogmatism'.
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Virtually everyone today considers himself to be rational. Reason was discovered and invented by the Greeks 2600 years ago, and few serious thinkers -- historically and currently -- reject reason to any considerable degree. But just because essentially everybody fancies himself to possess rational beliefs, and to manifest rational behaviors, doesn't make it so. Irrationality is rife throughout human society, culture, history, and philosophy. A person isn't rational if he holds a profound or wide-ranging skepticism about the power of the human mind to comprehend reality, or to generate a meaningful, worthwhile, successful life. This type of fundamental Skepticism is massively irrational and the root of all evil. Doubting or disbelieving in the practicality, efficacy, and authority of reason is, by defintion, irrational. So too is rejecting the evidence of the senses, and of personal experience, in one's lifestyle -- and then declining to apply logic to it. People are irrational who are a relativist/subjectivist or a dogmatist/faithist in their epistemology or reasoning. Truth-seeking and problem-solving requires reason uncorrupted by emotion, intuition, drives, instincts, revelation, and authority. To be solidly rational, complicated, contradictory, nonsensical claims and propositions can't be a significant part of one's thoughts, words, and deeds. And mystical, superstitious ideas, along with mythical, supernatural beings, can't be a significant part of one's life.
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