Thought Dishonesty

 Thought Dishonesty is the habit of training yourself to think your own beliefs are special, even infallible to some degree, and everyone else's are made up of different mistakes and or lies. This also means that a person must believe that their own perceptions are just as infallible as their beliefs, at least when it comes to perceiving anything that validates one's beliefs or invalidates everyone else's, and everyone else's are flawed.  

If the Catholic sees the Virgin Mary or the sun dancing in the sky, they are infallible as much in their perception of it as they are infallible in their interpretation of what it must mean, even as they are equally convinced that whenever anyone else sees the exact same kind of miracles through the lens of their own brand of god and religion, they are flawed or deceived. This double standard, which either goes unnoticed or is easily justified by a divine standard, is thought dishonesty.

Thought dishonesty is thus the ability to allow a "belief" to always cast whatever evils our own God engages in as always and only righteous and "good," while anyone who engages in the exact same kinds of evils is always "evil," unless they were doing it because they misunderstood what the beliefs they were relying on really required of them. This is how Christians today view Christians from centuries past who burned witches and heretics, and had slaves. If someone burned Christians as heretics of Allah or Apollo, such people are "evil" and the Christians are martyrs. If Christians burn other Christians, as they so often have, or non-Christians, as they also always have (Read Susan Jacoby's Strange Gods: A History of Conversion"), as heretics, the Christians doing the burning where simply mistaken about the true nature of Christianity.

What allows the person who thinks this way, so that their dependence on such a double standard is equal to their denial of using any such double standard at all, is their "belief" that they are not being in anyway dishonest (with only themselves, however) when they say they are NOT relying on a double standard - you are! (Some Catholics do this all the time - it's practically their mantra.)

Consider the difference between the atheist and the Roman Catholic. The latter can accuse the former of simply "believing'" there is no God just as much as the former can accuse of latter of believing the exact same thing about every other God but the one particular brand of "God" the Roman Catholic feels the need to "believe" does, in fact, exist. 

Why does the Catholic think their "belief" in the existence in their brand of God is superior to the atheist's "belief"  that such a God is no more real than all the other gods the Catholic "believes" do not exist? 

That is because the Catholic is convinced that their brand of God is wholly different than any and every other god ever imagined by human beings. This "belief" depends on a necessary ignorance of every other god ever imagined, the vast majority of which we have no ability to know anything about. 

Of the gods we have any awareness of, thanks mostly to the invention of writing roughly 5 thousand years ago, it turns out that the Catholic God is but a composite of so many of those Gods. Indeed, the monotheism of Catholicism is simply an amalgamation of all of the other gods of all of the other cultures.

The Catholic God is the ocean of an idea into which all of the other gods before are but rivers  of thought that have flowed into it as the whole cosmos of thinking, and onto which was then affixed the word "God," as the personification of all that is "good," and into its opposite the Devil, which is equally the personification of all that is "evil." 

What was "evil" about the other gods is often what is also good about the Catholic god. When the pagan gods killed throngs of people, they were evil, but when the Catholic god does the same thing, he is "good." 

This is the example of thought dishonesty that Catholicism requires from Catholics. They MUST believe that when God commits an act of genocide, it is morally good. Genocide is only evil, as such, when it is engaged in for false gods. That every genocide is carried out by people who are as sincerely convinced they are killing for the "one true God" as every other person who has ever felt they were killing or dying for their own brand of "true god," is something every Catholic must deny, lest they be forced to confront themself in everyone they condemn. 

And in their denial, every Catholic becomes a Judas to every other Jesus but the one they worship. And the one they worship is the one that denies they are a hypocrite in claiming they are more right in their "belief" that every other god is false but their own, even though their own god is merely the sum of every other god we have on record.  

I grew up in a house full of people engaging in such thought dishonesty, and practiced it even more than anyone else. Maybe that's what allowed me to see I was doing so, and why most of them are still committed to denying they were, just like I always did.