I was thinking about hierarchy of belief and how it can cause apparently unrelated problems.

Let’s illustrate it with a flow chart which shows how a terrorist attack at a gay club becomes possible:

Basically, you end up with very bizarre beliefs and behaviors that are a logical consequence of accepting previous, apparently logical and sensible steps. That’s how you get people who believe that Earth is flat, that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that Earth is some 6000 years old, but that’s also how you get people who get to believe that the Earth is over 4 billion years old. They just follow a different hierarchy of belief: for instance that the world is real, that its laws are constant, that it isn’t a simulation that’s running on some astral computer, that it all behaves linearly independent on existence of observers, etc.

If at least one accepted belief in the chain proves to be false, the final conclusion will be worthless. So when we see a terrorist who takes an AR-15, goes into a building and shoots people (whether they are gay, Jews, workers in an abortion clinic or audience at a heavy metal concert is irrelevant), we naturally think he’s fucked up in the head because his beliefs and actions are contrary to all reasonable and accepted behavior, but the thing is, you can’t just dismiss his internal flow chart. There is some decision-making process he went through and came up with those conclusions. It doesn’t happen at random. Also, people don’t just happen to join cults at random. There’s a flow chart: is there a God, are there people who know God and can lead others to God, is this guru one such person, how should one act when he meets such a person, and you end up shaving your head, wearing a saffron robe and chanting 16 rounds of Hare Krishna a day. The conclusion sounds ridiculous when you’re unfamiliar with the particular flow chart, but when you think of it, people are usually lead down the garden path of consistency with all previous steps taken, where one thing follows from another, until you get something that appears to be completely irrational.

That Muslim shooting 100 gays, he wasn’t irrational. He just accepted that there is one God, he’s called Allah, he sent a prophet called Mohamed who revealed the perfect and authoritative scripture called Qur’an, and there are also the Hadith about his life and sayings that clarify matters further, this is all authoritative and if one wants to be saved for eternal life he must adhere to those instructions.

That those internal flow charts exist is obvious; the true question is, what is yours, and what if it contains faulty premises that result in fatal errors?