&Psi. SCIENCE AND OPINION. I'm slowly working my way through my emails. (Intermittent outages of my home internet connection are no help.) I've gotten several of the following sort:

  1. Person X says he is deeply offended by my saying that homosexuals are more likely to be child molesters.

  2. Person X also says that he thinks I should have presented some evidence before I said such a thing. (Sometimes this is said to be what a good scholar and scientist would do.)

  3. Person X does not mention any evidence himself.

Since there are several such emails, there are probably more readers like them out there, and I thought I'd post the basic contradiction in position 1-2-3 here in the web-log. It is this:

If Person X has no evidence on the subject himself, why is he deeply offended? Part 2 of his email says that a person should refrain from having an opinion until he has evidence, and so should certainly refrain from having a strong opinion. So by his own criteria, Person X has no right to have an opinion on the subject.

As I explained in detail in earlier web-log postings, I think Part 2 is wrong, so what I'm doing here is just exposing an internal inconsistency of Person X. If anybody wants to use just Part 1 and Part 3, they're not inconsistent. Or, if they have just Part 1 and Part 2, and do give me some evidence, then they're not inconsistent either (they're still wrong on Part 2, but they're not internally inconsistent) .

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