#camel bones

[roadkillandcrows]

Lovely weathered camel leg bones (a humerus and femur) I got from someone who found them in the Jordan desert.

[transfigurationblues]

Expanding on a post I wrote here on a book that I read and enjoyed thoroughly, I'm discussing the way American evangelicals read the Bible on In Progress this week:

"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.