Let me ask you a hypothetical.
Say you meet a guy who in the natural course of some conversation you realise believes 2+2=5. He appears to be otherwise fairly normal, but on further investigation you realise he’s not joking and this is in fact a firm belief of his.
You might try to show him basic proofs of his error and so on, but he is absolutely resistant to all of it. He ignores every reality placed before him and continues to argue for a demonstrable and obvious falsity any educated 5 year old can see plainly as being false.
Not only that, but he also assumes a position of superiority, authority, and “ridicule” towards those “believers in 4”. In essence trying to reverse reality as if his position was the factual one, despite all absolute clarity to the contrary.
Now, let me ask you the question:
Would you respect such a character? Would you, in short, find his intellect worthy of engaging when this is his unalterable position?
Please consider that question fully now as there are a couple of other points related to it coming up, but it’s important for your own intellectual integrity that you first answer this question for yourself internally first.
Also note I am not asking whether he has a right to life, whether his soul is any less loved by God, or anything like that. I am merely asking if you would/could continue to have any respect for his intellect, both specifically relating to math, as well as relating to everything else that has anything to do with logic and reason. Of course, he might be a brilliant painter for example, one could respect his ability in that field, but I for one, would put near-enough zero validity in ANY theory he might have concerning the WHY his paintings are brilliant; especially if his explanations involved anything to do with mathematics. He may have an instinctive talent at mixing colours, which would be noted, but given his 2+2=5 there is no way possible that if he were to try and tell me about the colour-mixing ratios, that he would be correct other than by coincidental chance, since he is completely off about the entire field of mathematics.
So, on having clarified that, I ask again:
Could you respect the intellect, reasoning capacity, ability to do logic, of such a person?
Answered for yourself? Good.
Now here is a follow-up question.
What if alongside him, 90% of the people that live in your city agreed with him and also had the same attitude/approach, governed by the same arrogance, lack of capacity to demonstrate the “validity” of their view, and ignored the fact that physical reality made it clear their “model” cannot work nor predict anything?
Could you respect THEIR intellects? Would the fact you are in the minority change anything for you?
What if of the remaining 10%, 9% of them were “agnostic”, meaning they say things like “oh I don’t know, it’s not really important/my thing/something I think about, why don’t you just ignore it and have fun?”
Would you respect their intellect?
These are genuine questions.
Got your answer? Good.
If your answer was “No.” Pretty much throughout, welcome! Now you know what it’s like being a Sedevacantist (aka Catholic) surrounded by Novus Ordo “Catholics”.
In a subsequent post I will explain Catholicism for dummies 101, so even if you know NOTHING about Catholicism, you can at least understand the basics and verify them for yourself in just a few minutes.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
