Originally posted by Wilkowsky
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1) Everyone is biased. You can't help it. Everything you experience is filtered through the lens of past experiences, past understandings, current understandings, personality, general beliefs, etc. Bias is inevitable. What you shouldn't do is correlate that with inaccuracy. I think Tim Minchin puts it well:
As he says, learn to identify them. Learn to identify them in others. Above all, don't use this as a hand-wave. That a scholar is Christian doesn't mean their work is faulty. That a scholar is non-theistic doesn't make their work solid. Or vice versa.
2) It's impossible to know everything. There simply isn't time. What you can do is learn to evaluate. Where does this person get their information? What is their methodology? What is their background? A person with failings in one or more of these issues may not automatically wrong, but you're looking primarily for trustworthiness. Yes, your judgment can be wrong. It probably will be wrong at some point. That's ok.
3) Accept that you will get things wrong. Nobody is perfect, and it's not necessary anyway. Honest and earnest investigation is the best you can do, so do your best. I know more than a few Christians who will say that such investigation will lead you to God in the end.
4) No god worthy of worship is waiting around trying to kill you or punish you just because it can. Eternity with such a god wouldn't be a guarantee of happiness, either. Worry about the end game less. Nobody really knows anyway.
5) Please spend some time on epistemology as suggested, but don't let it bog you down. There aren't definite answers there, either, but at least it will give you a footing making some decisions.
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