Around this time of the year it seems that the BMJ, formerly known as the the British Medical Journal, presents findings on quirky things. (Perhaps the Brits have a tendency toward quirkiness. I like it.) What caught my attention was the debunking of a belief - apparently rather prevalent in Denmark - that one can become intoxicated by soaking one's feet in vodka. Seems the BMJ did the requisite blood test examinations and found no increase in blood alcohol content with this odd habit of some of the Danish people.
How do beliefs based on obviously fuzzy thinking persist? As supposedly thinking, intelligent beings (I almost said "rational" but that description has been pretty thoroughly discredited in multiple lines of research. And perhaps that observation renders this particular query an exercise in useless rhetorical musing.) isn't there a sort of constant calibration, of testing and measuring things we believe against our best evaluation of the way things really are? Is it some sort of mental laziness that allows many to believe things based on little or no evidence? Do some construct a framework of beliefs about the nature of reality that they find so appealing that they either don't test those beliefs against an objective standard or actively resist the intrusion of facts or evidence against those beliefs? Do the comforts people find in the things they believe outweigh the risks of believing things that just aren't so?
No one can doubt that beliefs can have consequences that have the potential to alter existence itself for the individual or the whole of humanity. Shouldn't that be all that is necessary to motivate us to consider how well the things we believe measure up to the evidence?
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