Using my critical thinking I come to the conclusion that some may hide behind God to mask their own discomfort with homosexuality.

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

Anybody who acts because "God told me so" is flirting with danger because one can never be certain when it is God talking or the day old pizza that was eaten the night before.

And I suspect that you have a very good point, there, too.

Still, that leads us to the same place, doesn't it? The person who is uncomfortable with something, who then blames their discomfort on "God's will," is still avoiding doing the critical thinking that might help to resolve their discomfort. (Of course, I realize that it might not, too. People are perfectly free to arrive at their own conclusions.)

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Could the main function of having the ability to critique an event or situation be simply that of survival ( however that arises: at an intersection, in a classroom, during a medical situation, etc.)?

Open

Survival is always the issue.

We must be critical thinkers because frankly, our brains lead us astray far too easily. There are, as is pointed out in psychologist Thomas Kida's new book "Don't Believe Everything You Think," 6 critical errors that permeate our thinking, leading us to sometimes odd beliefs or even worse, to dangerous cognitive errors.

1. We prefer stories to statistics. We would believe our neighbour that their brand of HDTV stinks sooner than we would a Consumer Reports saying that it got fairly high survey scores overall.
2. We are always looking to confirm our beliefs, and will typically select evidence that confirms rather than denies them. People who read horoscopes will find the 2 things in a month of columns that seem confirmed in their horoscope, while generally not even noticing the 35 predictions that weren’t even close. Another example would be that “things always come in threes.” After the third incident, the believer in that particular aphorism says “see!” and then stops counting, only to begin counting again from 1 at the next incident. Thus, the belief is confirmed!
3. Misunderstanding chance and coincidence, an inability to figure out probabilities. The most famous, of course, is the gambler’s fallacy where after a string of tails in a coin toss, that heads is “due.” It’s not true, but it’s a commonly held way of seeing such things.
4. Trusting the reliability of our senses, as in “I know what I heard, man!" We never know for sure that our senses really perceive and report correctly what is going on around us, because our brains build, based on very limited sensory input, a reconstruction of the external world and events in it. Thus, perception is easily influenced by beliefs and expectations, and hallucinations really are more common than people think.
5. We tend to oversimplify, to use “rules of thumb” in thinking and deciding, so that we can do it quickly. Complex issues cannot usually be satisfactorily worked out using quick heuristics.
6. Our memories are really not as good as we think. Not only do we all forget things sometimes, but we also mis-remember, leading us to “remember” things differently than they occurred, or actually to “remember” things that didn’t occur at all. A lot of memory research demonstrates this clearly, and we must remember that memory (like sensory input) is a reconstruction in the brain, usually through the lens of current beliefs and expectations. And the critical point is that we cannot distinguish inaccurate memories or accurate ones. They all feel the same.

Our brains are made this way, so we can’t change very much. But what we can do is to recognize our limitations, and then use as much critical thinking as possible to ensure that we reduce the number of errors to as few as possible.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Yes and no. There are things that are beliefs, but there are also external objective realities for which no amount of wishful thinking will help us breach. I'm thinking of things like natural laws like gravity, which apply to us all. This can also apply in some cases to more subjective things, like the regular emails that arrive in my inbox telling me I've won a lottery. That's where critical thinking comes in, because at some point you have to use some discernment and realise that realistically that the claims are likely to be false given that you never entered the lottery in the first place or that real lotteries don't charge for anything other than the ticket!

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Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Marie Curie

I would say that critical thinking is the method to move from belief to understanding. Of course, how many beliefs one can attempt to move to understanding is an entirely different question. Plato would also argue the journey is not complete until we move our understanding into knowledge.

-TC

hi TC...i need a break down...


would this be like...the key board i type on allows the letters to appear on the screen......so i have a understanding of what the keyboard can do and how to use it...but ...I do not like the designer of the key board know how the componets operate ...passed a brief understanding ...is this what is being stated above...understanding or knowledge of is not the same as full understanding and knowledge...and then...it is not something that can be complete but something that is strived for...yes...no.....