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You’re coming to the exact opposite, wrong conclusions here.

1) in the trust-Bush example, anyone who actually, properly learned “how to sense when other people have a depth of knowledge or experience that is unavailable to you” would have sensed that Bush was full of shit, didn’t know what he was doing, and was a terrible person to have in charge. Honing that skill is incredibly valuable in life, precisely because it protects you from having to blindly trust anyone based on a claim (accurate or not) that they know what they're doing.

2) This is not theology at all. Theology is about accepting a claim despite your inability to rationalize it, or accepting it precisely because your ability to rationalize it is broken or flawed—and both being in the realm of deities.

What erikpukinskis was describing is the process of cultivating empathy and trust, in face of the acknowledgement that your perceived reality is not necessarily accurate (which it isn’t for anyone on the planet). He's saying that there are a lot of smart people who simply cannot believe that “something” is truly happening if they have no personal experience with that “something”, and may, as a result, deny the reality that is that “something”.

And he’s saying that, for him at least, it was necessary to learn to accept these things as true, first, before being able to figure out and rationalize them on his own, later, without having to be personally exposed to the problem for it.

And that’s called empathy, not theology.

Theology is what happens when you accept a claim first and try to rationalize it second. Perhaps apologetics is a better term. In any case, I find it profoundly backwards. Being able to entertain a claim is important, vitally so, but just as long as you're able to hold off accepting it.

As for Bush, it's factually true that he did have a depth of knowledge that was unavailable to me. What was harder to tell was whether he was using it correctly. Perhaps you have a telepathic sense of whether or not people are correctly using the information they have access to; perhaps you don't, but confirmation bias gives you the persistent illusion that you do.

I'll just close by saying that I don't claim to know very much at all more than provisionally--I'm willing to have my understanding updated based on new information, and I'm comfortable with people coming to different conclusions from different sets of information. What I'm not willing to do is grant other people write access to my beliefs based upon my emotional estimate of their credibility.

The arrogance in this post is stunning. Nobody has ever or ever will have more knowledge or experience than you on any topic at all. And to put any trust in another person is equivalent to theological 'faith'. Wow.

Firstly theology isn't a good comparison because god isn't a concept that can be 'experienced' or disproved. The issues that feminists talk about are generally not like this: if you really want to know how much more physically threatening the world seems as a woman, one could feasibly have a sex change operation or similar to allow you to experience the world as a woman. Or if you aren't so arrogant as to discount all knowledge that you didn't directly experience yourself, you could ask a large number of women and see what they have to say.

Secondly, you seem vastly ignorant about epistemology and how science works in general. Ultimately it very much is a system of trust in people and institutions. Your categorising of knowledge into "theology" and "real knowledge" based on one requiring faith is a false dichotomy.

I can only imagine how awful it must be to know you in real life if you never trust a single thing other people say to you without verifying it yourself (that is my way of saying you are a terrible human being).

What feminists and theologians have in common--and how I differ from them, based on more familiarity with epistemology than you think--is that they never seem to entertain the possibility that they are wrong. I, on the other hand, don't actually claim to know anything about anything as mysterious as gods, or as complicated as human society. I just have working estimates.

I trust that other people have evidence that I don't and that they can't give to me. I can even accept it as some sort of indirect evidence, so that if other people unanimously tell me that Nevada exists and practically no one disagrees, I accept the claim. What I can't do is accept a seemingly dogmatic ideology like feminism based solely upon trusting some, but clearly not all women. I can be influenced by it, and when presented with direct and indirect evidence I can allow that evidence to upgrade my estimate, but in my experience feminists are unaccepting of anything short of full, dogmatic agreement. That--the attitude of any ideologue--is as good a marker as I've ever found that someone isn't using their evidence correctly.

My working estimate so far includes a pretty reliable heuristic--it's always more complicated. Feminism, like any ideology, is actually pretty enlightening from a certain perspective, since it raises a lot of issues that can complicate our understanding of the world. But the problem is, the world is even more complicated than the feminists themselves think.

So yes, I listen to indirect evidence, but I don't buy other people's conclusions wholesale. And far from being arrogant--I'm often more willing to throw my hands in the air and admit I really don't and can't know the answer to the question. I struggle with things like voting a lot because of this.

it's reassuring to finally see a confession that feminism is an exercise in blind faith, and is hence of no use to rational people.

There are volumes of feminism that I understand, and could explain to you, in purely rational terms. The vast, vast bulk of beliefs I have that are considered "feminist" fall into this category. So no, I don't think feminism is an exercise in blind faith.

Provisional reliance on the beliefs of trusted second parties is only one of my many ways of knowing.

I also object to calling it "blind faith" because it's not blind. I've vetted the source. It is a kind of faith. Maybe you can call it "provisional faith". If there is solid evidence I certainly use that first. But in many cases there is no evidence. For example, when someone says they were raped I will rarely ever see any conclusive "evidence" one way or the other, so any evidence-based approach to understanding will fail.

I also want to throw in that your (apparent) belief that you don't take anyone's ideas on faith is utterly implausible. I think you're just blissfully unaware of where your ideas come from.