| | Jay,
The thing to focus on is the concept of compartmentalization. For what ever reason, a person sets subconscious markers so that when given content is triggered, they use a different process. Think of someone who is a normally relaxed confident person, but has a fear of closed spaces. You will see things change in the way they process anything having to do with closed spaces. In that case the emotional reaction is markedly different, but if you think about it, the underlying reasoning must also be different from how they process other content.
Perfectly normal people, in different cultures believe in virgin birth, talking bushes, coming back from the dead, that cows are sacred, that they will get 72 virgins when they ascend to paradise, that spirits inhabit the threshold of buildings, that a mirror over the door will deflect bad spirits from your business, that spitting behind a foreigner as they walk past will keep their bad spirits from jumping onto you, etc., etc. Compartmentalized thinking lets people maintain not just contradictory thoughts, but radically different processes for manipulation of concepts in specified areas.
With people that don't deal with ideas for a living and with people that aren't terribly bright this doesn't strike us with such force. But when we find a scientist that doesn't believe in evolution it does, or when we see a person that is as intelligent and well educated as Coulter it is very striking. But what happens is that the compartmentalized area has some kind of powerful emotional investment - something from an early age. That force acted through out their development to motivate them to find rationalizations and the more of that they did, and the more they used denial for the twinges of doubt, for the inkling of a contradiction, and the stronger the compartmental wall became.
We can't function without automatizing a great deal of our processes. Try walking to the door, turning the knob, and going out, if you had to explicitly, consciously address every single muscle contraction and readdress that action's relation to the sub-sub-goal (lift leg), the sub-goal (move towards door) and the goal itself (go to the kitchen for a sandwich). We automatize not just large numbers of subroutines, but also that very kind of mental processing. We automatize defensive reactions as well - and attach them to triggers.
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"I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs. "
