I recently spent eight hours stuck in a car with one of these people, driving (appropriately enough) across Kansas. She wasn't stupid; quite to the contrary, she appeared capable of intricate reasoning and sophisticated thought when doing so suited her. However, anything that contradicted her belief system was rejected out of hand before it could engage her rational faculties. The primary value in her belief system was pure faith and revelation straight from her god, unpolluted by learned knowledge.
The personal history she related to me over the course of the trip, and the spiritual questing that she seemed to have engaged in before arriving at her belief system indicated to me that she was capable of said internal assessment, but that any external information had been overwhelmed by her internal revelations.
To me, it seemed like the voice of god in her head drowned out everything else, becoming the singular point around which all other information had to be warped to fit.
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Date: 2008-04-18 07:26 am (UTC)The personal history she related to me over the course of the trip, and the spiritual questing that she seemed to have engaged in before arriving at her belief system indicated to me that she was capable of said internal assessment, but that any external information had been overwhelmed by her internal revelations.
To me, it seemed like the voice of god in her head drowned out everything else, becoming the singular point around which all other information had to be warped to fit.