All in all pointless in dealing with cognitive dissonance. The first post was useful, and encouraged, RHM’s post was nothing if not …full of sound and fury…..

Very nicely put. It must have been great to grow up with a Dad like yours, teaching you to think, rather than to mimic the irrationalities of other irrational mimickers.

1) Use what rules you hold to prove what you have reasoned or observed.

2) If the rules allow a contradiction to be derived, then you must reassess your rules and remove and/or revise those which allow this contradiction. In any complex system this will be a constant effort.

3) It does not matter who you are, what degrees you have, or how nice the ideas involved in the contradiction are. Reality wins in the end.

4) This is why ideals never hold true, and always cause problems. Even Newton could not hold reality to ideal laws. And he was the smartest person so far.

We start training people to accept cognitive dissonance as a normal functional thought process as children. We do this with Santa and other imaginary beings which supposedly watch them 24/7 judging them. They then have to reconcile this with the complete lack of evidence, and others behaviour which is contrary to being watched and judged. Like catholic clergy hiding paedophiles from people and allowing them to move to greener pastures, but not worrying about God knowing, if they believed in God would they do that?

We need to teach people that constant confirmation of evidence, IE scientific method is a healthy and useful thought process. It works and self corrects mistakes.

When I was 6 we had moved to the country and had a fireplace, my father had cut wood for it, first in three foot lengths then after bringing it closer to the house into usable lengths. He came out of the house one day as I was dragging a narrow three foot section up to the house. He naturally questioned me about it. I said I was going to build a deadfall, I had been reading stories about boys in the 1800′s like Laura Ingles Wilder’s husbands book. He was obviously concerned and asked why. I reminded him it was Dec 24th, I was setting it up in case of Santa. I had been told there was no Santa which he reminded me of.
Yes I told him but I have no experimental evidence, just your word. I remember how proud he looked, till he realised that I was prepared to kill Santa. Santa was a spook, a spy who watched people so fair game right?
So he asked “,if it works you will have a dead body in the living room, what would you propose we do with it?” “Give it to the Smithsonian, they can stuff him, and the sleigh and reindeer can go to NASA,” which my father was working for.

Lying to children does not help their thought process, telling them the truth helps them build a logical thought process. Remember the look on that kid in third grade who still believed in Santa? Confused and ashamed, I think that explains the visceral reaction the religious have toward Atheists.

I was sent home early in third grade for asking in home room who still believed in Santa the Tooth Fairy or God. It was worth it seeing the other kids look around the room and start thinking.