Dear Laura,
I hope you and your loved ones are well.
You make me remember my own gullible reaction to the report of 2.3 trillion dollars "having gone missing" the day before 9/11.
Actually, the unaccounted expenditures (a horrifying lack of accountability in any event) were written into the public record a full year earlier. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/rumsfeld-did-not-reveal-loss-23-trillion-day-before-911-2023-09-14/
*****
I did not start studying biological science - formally - until I was in my early twenties, and so it took me a long time to realize a persistent fallacy in my thinking.
We do not "prove" things by mere accumulation of data that seems to support our position.
Rather, we need to test carefully-formulated hypotheses about attractive "truths" in order to determine, if by application of The Scientific Method, our hypotheses hold up, or fall apart.
Even then, The Scientific Method requires that the results of one test be replicated - again and again - part of the overarching process called "peer review," and the ongoing refinement of "findings," or perhaps a "paradigm reversal" altogether.
As truth seekers, it is not our job to gather mountains of "anecdote, hearsay, apparent causal connection, and untested hypotheses" in the mistaken belief that this Everest of "evidence" proves our position, but rather, it is the role of truth seekers to try to prove ourselves wrong.
I repeat: "To try to prove ourselves wrong."
Only then do we truly honor "the Way, the Truth and the Life."
Anything else distills to self-interested demonstration of our "rightness" - and our personal self-justification - in a world where anyone can generate whatever data or self-interested proof s/he needs.
How You... And I... And Everyone... Can Create REAL Damning Evidence To Justify "Any Damn Thing" - Divorce; One's Religious Faith As "The One, True Religion"; Donald Trump As A Godsend; The Advisability Of Provoking Armageddon, Hitler's Heinous Extermination Of Jews
Unless every supposition, insinuation, or "proof" of guilt-by-association is tested as a hypothesis -- taking into account all contradictory evidence -- and, correspondingly, NOT stacking the deck with what "we" have accumulated inside our "confirmation bias bubbles," it is true that our unsubstantiated postulates may, accidentally, coincide with Truth. But in the overwhelming number of cases -- take "conspiracy theories" for example -- they are just that, theories, not scientifically demonstrated truths.
The unanswered postulate I put to conspiracists is this: "In order for two people to keep a secret, at least one of them needs to be dead."
We humans blabber - and no one blabbers more than a conspiracist.
"Confirmation Bias And The Power Of Disconfirming Information"
As a significant aside, I should mention that "final questions" such as those posed by the world's religions are, intrinsically, not provable because faith, by definition, is faith and faith is not knowledge.
As an aside, I will mention my "theory" that those most prone to state their beliefs as certainties are the very ones who tend to harbor the deepest doubts about their beliefs, and so - to shore up their belief systems with the appearance of wide (if not universal) applicability, they deliberately stack the deck with compendia of unproven (but seemingly true) hypotheses-and-assertions, and then they take refuge in their "confirmation bias bubbles" - all of these interrelated tactics being very much like the epistemological underpinnings of your Thinking Housewife blog, where you meticulously control EVERYTHING that you post, thus making it look -- even to you -- as if the "whole enlightened world" is on your side.
That said, it is notable how often you publish highly-questionable, untested information, and simultaneously issue the disclaimer that you "don't always agree" with your source when it comes to many of his views.
I smell bogosity.
You quote sources in support of your position, and then warn your readers that your source is probably not very trustworthy.
Mingya!
C'mon Laura, you're better than that. And God (whom I believe is both all-loving and ultimately inscrutable) is immeasurably bigger than the procrustean bed in which you (and your theologians-of-choice) always confine him.
You see the world and its component parts as either/or propositions, when - at the deepest level, the world -- a highly paradoxical place -- is very likely "both/and".
No doubt you know the story of Thomas Aquinas:
In the Thurston and Attwater revision of Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, the episode is described this way:
On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
I encourage you, Laura, to wake up and smell the Magnum Mysterium.
Why Facts Don't Change Our Mind
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
*****
But back to the matter in hand.
Concerning your supposition that there is a nefarious connection between "the trillions" that went missing on September 10th, and 9/11 "being a coverup," it is provable that your supposed connection did not exist.
And so it goes.
Connecting the dots by using "supposition," "insinuation," "anecdotes" and "opinion" (often second hand) you end up with a MASSIVE pile of data that "seems" to prove your beliefs, but more often that not, doesn't.
How You... And I... And Everyone... Can Create REAL Damning Evidence To Justify "Any Damn Thing" - Divorce; One's Religious Faith As "The One, True Religion"; Donald Trump As A Godsend; The Advisability Of Provoking Armageddon, Hitler's Heinous Extermination Of Jews
Consider almost any of Trump's assertions, all of them accepted as fact by his cultists -- who, more often than not, are "White Christian Nationalists" like yourself.
To spotlight one case in point, consider Trump's view of American healthcare over the last decade.
Check out the meme below featuring a verbatim statement that Trump made in October, 2016. Now, 8 years after Trump uttered this full-throttle egregious lie, The Liar said (in his debate with Kamala Harris) that he now has "concepts of a healthcare plan," without providing one single component of his postulated plan.
ANYONE who believes Donald Trump on healthcare (or damn near any other issue) has his head ensconced in The Dark Place.
*****
The Death Of Epistemology: Update
Trolls... And The End Of Civilization As We Knew It
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