Bad Thoughts

I recently bought and read a book called Bad Thoughts by Jamie Whyte, mostly, I think, because Amazon recommended it (Amazon's recommendations are occasionally strange and sometimes disturbingly accurate). It's subtitled A Guide to Clear Thinking and that's pretty accurate. It's short, witty book that looks at all sorts of logical fallacies and seems to find that Tony Blair commits all of them...

Anyway, its the sort of book I'd recommend to the very people who would never read it, namely those who don't often worry about the logic of their arguments. The people who would read it would probably just keep nodding their head ruefully through various sections.

Looking for anything else Whyte has written, mostly to bolster up my Wishlist, I found an article in New Scientist. This bit made me smile:

In your book you are quite harsh on religion. Aren't people entitled to their faith?

This is one of my favourite errors. An interesting change has happened, at least in the west. It used to be that people would argue for a particular religious dogma or a clear religious doctrine. That is no longer what happens. The world is increasingly dividing into those who have "faith" and those who don't. It doesn't really matter what the faith is. That is why you now get "faith groups" coming together from all kinds of different religions. The weirdest manifestation of this new tendency is when people say: "I'm not a Christian but I believe in something." Then I say: "Of course, I believe in many things, like there is a chair there and a table. What are you talking about?" And they reply: "Well, you know, something more." But what "more"? What they mean is something more than we have any good reason to believe in.

That really seems to get to you!

What amazes me is that they like to set themselves up as having a slightly finer sensibility than you or me but in fact they are completely intellectually irresponsible. They used to come up with very bad arguments for their faiths but at least they felt that there was something they should provide. Now mere willfulness has triumphed. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth. You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. Rather, beliefs are part of your wardrobe. You've got a style and how dare anybody tell you that your style isn't right. Ideology is seen as simply a matter of taste and as it's not right to tell people that they've got bad taste, so it's not right to tell them that their opinions are false. I'm afraid that the cast of mind of most people is the opposite of scientific.