About Religion: Ch. 2 Denegating God

In Chapter 2, Taylor takes us through an exercise in a kind of home-brewed double-negative cryptology.  My roommate is a psych student, and she was recently telling me about why the phrase “I am not a crook” was a total career-disaster for Nixon.  Basically, our brains don’t process negative statements (as in to negate) as quickly and easily as positive ones.  Our knee-jerk reaction to a statement like “I am not a crook” is to doubt it’s true.  We would be more ready to believe a statement like “I am honest”. 

Beginning this chapter, I doubted if Taylor had ever had the privilege of living with a psych student.  Granted, I realize that his words are carefully chosen, and that the point he’s making wouldn’t be made if he’d chosen the easier phrasing for his sentences. 

Still, it was exhausting to fight through.  

*as part of an assignment/educational experiment, I am blogging my way through the required reading for one of my courses this quarter. If you wish to read all the posts that I write for this class click on the label TC 500, below. I will also be tweeting some thoughts as well. Check them out at @nickybarger, they're labeled with #tc500