Comment Re:Spiritual Needs (Score 1) 268
I believe that you think narcc's post is stupid.
Actually, I get the strong impression that you yourself believed that narcc actually meant what he posted. (I don't believe, though, that either of these are examples of something believed "in the face of evidence to the contrary". That kind of belief is more displayed by, for example, battered partners and their ilk, and is rarer. One could make a case that since our beliefs shape the way our mind builds our reality from our sensory input, it's probably quite common that "evidence to the contrary" just gets rejected by the individual until it reaches some kind of critical threshold, whereas others seeing the same evidence see it as "evidence to the contrary" long before.)
Most, if not all, reasoning we make about others' "state of mind" is mere belief. (Maybe in the far future we'll be able to MRI the brains of the people we interact with, in real time --- flash of memory of L. Frank Baum(?) story which included a similar plot device...)