Wednesday, December 21, 2022

The Nature Of Hearsay (Part 2)

Unless someone articulates logical truths that anyone could realize by looking directly to reason, there is no such thing as that person making claims that are truly knowable.  However, this would not involve claiming that any particular event of the last happened except for the logically necessary creation of the cosmos by the uncaused cause [1] happened because there is no way to demonstrate any other particular event has actually took place.  Current events and history alike have this epistemological barrier separating one from this aspect of reality.  There are numerous ways, though, that many non-rationalists cling to double standards when it comes to which events of the historical timeline or present day that they believe, despite how they never have proof of these conclusions, only subjective persuasion, consensus, or random assumptions to fallaciously hold onto.

In part one of this series, I addressed the epistemological stupidity of belief in hearsay, all hearsay, not just random, possible but unprovable events that a person one subjectively likes says happened, as well as the relationship of this fact to both how one should live in light of the abundance of hearsay about serious matters and to the evidence for Christianity.  Here, I will focus on the utter hypocrisy of almost everyone who believes in hearsay.  Believing or disbelieving hearsay is epistemologically irrational in itself, but most people who situationally acknowledge certain claims of personal or historical events as hearsay are quick to embrace others as true simply because they are slaves to the fallacies they share with their supposedly honest source.  This is why there are fools who think they can know Fox News is telling the truth as opposed to CNN or vice versa, to give just one example.

It is the idea knowingly or unknowingly expressed when someone says "I trust this news organization is telling me the truth, but not that one."  It is the idiotic notion that one can "know" one news story about logically possible foreign events is true as opposed to another based on subjective persuasion or an assumption (that is all anyone could base their belief it is true or false in), or that one can be justified in believing without absolute logical proof instead of mere words.  If one newspaper reports that a natural disaster struck a country on the other side of the world and another reports that the disaster never occurred, how could one possibly know which is correct?  Either one could be true or could have been true, but only one can be true at a time.  In no case can one simply know which is the case by hearing or reading the assertion.

Scientists, historians, journalists, news reporters, and everyday people openly talk and act as if they make such assumptions all the time, yet hearsay is epistemologically nothing more than unverifiable and unfalsifiable claims--any logically possible event might have happened, but there is no way to prove it did.  This is no less true of whether someone committed murder five days ago than it is about whether Jesus resurrected almost two thousand years ago.  Hearsay is universally incapable of establishing anything except that there is hearsay.  However, conservatives and liberals, people stupid enough to confuse scientific experiences and the laws of logic, and many other groups of people will hold to obvious double standards when they do believe in hearsay, and rarely does someone consider the evidence for or against an event having happened, distinguish between evidence and proof, and make no assumptions at all about the matter.

When someone thinks that it is impossible to know if a favorite public figure who was accused of murder is guilty but that they can know the accuser is wrong, or thinks that they can know one historian claiming to know the past (instead of just evidences and perceptions suggesting that certain past events happened) is correct and another is wrong, they have added hypocrisy to their irrationality of making even a single assumption in the first place.  What this does not mean that people are irrational to just be honest in stating that they remember certain events happening or that certain events are logically possible or impossible.  On the contrary, recognizing evidences supporting or leading away from various logically possible ideas is entirely compatible with rationalism unless it is mingled with assumptions.


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