critical thinking

If a person wants to take openness to new ideas to its logical conclusion, she will not end up being gullible or credulous. Rather, she will be a skeptic. True open-mindedness is not the same as accepting assertions without critical consideration. In fact, believing claims without being critical of them results in having a closed mind.

In this part, we are going to move away from the tedium of proving everything with truth tables, going towards handy rules of inference. Think of these as shortcuts when trying to find out if someone’s statements make sense.

The purpose of this two-part primer is to introduce you, the reader, into the wonderfully complicated and interesting world of logic, the language which every internet intellectual claims to know so much about.

I mentioned in one of my comments that a “Christian freethinker” is an oxymoron, or loosely a “contradiction in terms”. I realize I should not have made such sweeping statement that might antagonize some liberal or progressive Christians.