your vote is not important; maybe you can change your sexual orientation after all; taylor swift is far better than bruce springsteen; stop pretending to like picasso, etc: well it's true that i kind of pick out things like that just specifically to mess with your consensus. now, perhaps you are offended that someone could even say shit like that. alright, tell you what: make me a list of all the sheer dogmata that cannot legitimately be questioned, all those holy things that it is blasphemy for human beings to doubt. sadly, you don't actually know what these things are, and you need someone with my particular epistemic illness to tell you. it will take me some years to make the enumeration, for there are thousands of such items. my view is that each of those things - specifically because of its status - is extremely likely to be false. and deep inside you know they're false, or you wouldn't need to exempt them from examination. indeed, i take, for example, the inquisition, as a demonstration that no one - least of all the inquisitors - actually did believe catholic theology. well have you ever looked squarely at catholic theology? honestly no one could believe it or even figure out what it could possibly mean to believe it,* so simulation had to be enforced. that's why pol pot had to execute you: not because he was a fanatic, exactly, but because deep in his heart he knew marxism was bullshit, and he knew you knew it too. you do know more or less what your vote is actually worth, i imagine, just like most folks who buy lottery tickets know the chance of winning a big jackpot is miniscule. anyway, once i get hold of this list, at least then i'll know what to nod along with or pretend passionately to believe so i can belong. or maybe there are groups in which there are not these sort of conditions for membership?
*take one of a thousand layers: "Everything which belongs to Christ - everything which makes Christ Christ ‑ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. This consequently means that Christ is present in His divinity as God and in His humanity as man. Christ is present in the Eucharist with His human body and human soul, with His bodily organs and limbs and with His human mind, will and feelings ‑ "the whole Christ." Latin reads Totus Christus." (http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/book/dctrine1.htm) maybe the position is that people used to believe stuff like that, or even that everyone believed it effortlessly. if so, they certainly had epistemic super-powers that we have lost. either that or everyone had to pretend to get something out of that while the people who were publicly puzzled paid the paramount price. we're not particularly doing any better, i feel.
