Negative Thinking is NOT Critical Thinking

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by coberst, Nov 8, 2008.

  1. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    Negative Thinking is NOT Critical Thinking

    Negative thinking often displays itself in ad hominem attacks. Often a forum has one or more individuals who have grown to think of themselves as the local ‘shaman’; these individuals try all kinds of ways to reject others who they fear will take away some of their ‘power’, so they use all forms of negative attacks to reject that new person.

    I have seen instances of individuals who are very anti-intellectual devise means for rejecting any form of ideas that appear to be intellectual.

    Ideologues are always fighting against other ideologues and they use every means to reject non-conforming ideas. I see that especially in anti-theism ideologues. I had one instance of an individual rejecting the works of Becker because Becker uses the word "faith", such a word was like the appearance of a snake under the bed.

    We are indoctrinated in our ideologies and we are constantly fighting either for ours or against another, this leads to various techniques to throw off any invading new ideas. Also I am convinced that our schools and colleges have made people unconsciously fearful of any serious concepts that have not been introduced to them by a teacher. Self-learning is unconsciously an alien concept.
     
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  3. synthesizer-patel Sweep the leg Johnny! Valued Senior Member

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    Critical thinking requires a balance between healthy scepticism, doubt, and open mindedness - I think that the balance is overall perhaps slightly negative - one must reject, or at least resist conclusions if insufficient evidence is there to support them.
    The result of this however is extremely positive - the courage to say "I don't know" or "the results are inconclusive" often brings out the very best in the human condition - the will to rise to challenges, confront the unknown, and accept failure or ignorance - I can think of no more courageous or worthy human endeavour than that.

    Of course faith does trump all of this - but then faith -by its very nature - by its very definition, is not critical - not that there is anything wrong with faith per se, it is when faith becomes confused with empiricism and is considered as a valid substitute for it is where problems and conflicts can arise between rationality and blind beleif.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2008
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  5. visceral_instinct Monkey see, monkey denigrate Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly, it's about time someone made that point - there's a difference between being critical and taking someone to pieces.
     
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  7. synthesizer-patel Sweep the leg Johnny! Valued Senior Member

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    Schools probably - poor to average colleges possibly - places like Regent University definitely - good colleges and universities certainly not.

    a decent university will spend a lot of effort in instilling in their students the need to be critical of both what they are taught, what they read, and what they present - the problem is perhaps that even some of the previously very good universities have become diploma mills
     
  8. ScyentsIzLief Banned Banned

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    The reason critical thinking is often seen as negative thinking because the society that the critical eye preys upon is a very sick society. I'm talking about many aspects of life.
     
  9. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    The greatest danger of religion, in my opinion, is that it destroys the habit of Critical Thinking.
     
  10. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    I think that we (USA) have never been taught HOW to think and how to be a Critical Thinker. We have been taught WHAT to think so that we can be more easily managed.
     
  11. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Is that how we became the richest, most powerful nation on Earth? I don't know, but somehow, I just doubt that the people of the USA were managed so easily by others. And ya' know something ....if it was that way, then it's obviously a damned good way, whatever you say about it.

    Baron Max
     
  12. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    I would disagree because negative thinking is still giving thought about something only in a negative way.
     
  13. ScyentsIzLief Banned Banned

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    We became a powerful nation simply because of our huge amounts of natural resources. Remember, we have never been attacked in the mainland, and our land is relatively new, which mean high reserves of natural resources. Also keep in mind, we only became the most powerful nation after 1989...that's less than 20 years of Hegemony.

    What we did after WW2 was steal engineers, scientists, technologies etc from all the countries we colonized (I'm not blaming them, it's what all powerful nations did) and used that to get ahead. Even the Atomic bomb wasn't an American concept. It came from Albert Einstein, who was german.
     

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