Vivid Memory Often Fallacious

The Sink-Holes of  Memory

It turns out that human beings are often afflicted with faulty memory.  Recall can be vivid, but wrong.  Is this a small, infrequent aberration?  Apparently not.

Science Shows People Regularly Remember Things That Didn’t Happen

In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences released a report summarizing decades of rigorous evidence demonstrating that people regularly ‘recall things we never experienced.’

By Edward Archer
The Federalist


“Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.” — George Santayana, “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”

In 1975, a young woman was brutally raped in her home while she was watching TV. Shortly thereafter, she identified her assailant as Dr. Donald Thomson. On the basis of her compelling and apparently credible testimony, Thomson was arrested and charged despite having an irrefutable alibi.

In an ironic and exculpatory turn of events, authorities discovered that, prior to the attack, the woman had been watching Thomson on live TV discussing the inaccuracies of eye-witness testimony and simply confused his face with that of her rapist’s. As bizarre as this incident may appear, false memories in concert with compelling but false testimony is often the rule rather than the exception.

Feminist Justice an Oxymoron of Oxymorons

Lies, Damned Lies, and Police Policy

"Feminist justice" is an oxymoron.  In fact, whenever it has been applied the results have been profound miscarriages of justice.  Those who advocate for it should be thrown in the clink, or something similar.  

Here is an example of the injustice of feminism at work in the UK.

A national police policy, backed by the National College of Policing, says rape accusers should always be “believed”, echoing the language of far-left radical feminists who believe we all live in a “rape culture”.  [Breitbart London]

Because the far-left radical feminist doctrines have been adopted by the police and applied to policing in the UK, gross miscarriages of justice have resulted.  Now, given the manifest injustices that have come to light, the National Police Chiefs Council has called for this feminist horror to be rescinded and the national police policy in the UK to be changed accordingly.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (On Criminal Justice)

False Witness

Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog

INTRODUCTION:

For Christians who want to be biblically grounded, the sin and crime of bearing false witness is a very big deal. It is serious for two great reasons. The first is that it is a violation of God’s holy law, which reflects His character. It was by means of this particular evil; technique that the Lord Jesus was railroaded, and so all Christians who love Jesus should hate the kind of lies that took Him to the cross. The first reason is therefore love of God.

The second reason is that the tables of the law are connected, and we cannot love God whom we have not seen without loving our neighbor, whom we have seen (1 John 4:20). But who is my neighbor? as the fellow once asked. Your neighbor is of course the one who might be falsely convicted on the basis of a lie—and this really is a grievous evil.

But our neighbor is also the person who really has been violated, but who has difficulty getting people to believe her story. Genuine victims are abused by the one who abused them directly, but they are also abused by those liars who make every genuine accusation more difficult. And the problem here is not the responsible officials who suspend judgment until the investigation of a reported crime is complete. That is what Scripture requires of them. The problem is made worse by the liars who have corrupted the system. Victims who effectively cannot come forward are the victims of the perpetrators who violated them in the first instance, and in the second they are also victims of those who traffic in deceit.