You don't understand why someone believes X?
More than once, someone has said something like this on an Internet forum:
I honestly don’t understand how delusional you’d have to be to think X
In the spirit of humility practice, pretend like you’ve said something like that at some point in your past. Yes, you.1 Actually, you probably don’t have to pretend. You’ve likely said it – or at least thought it – so just admit it. (As for me, I don’t have to pretend; I’ve done it and readily admit it.2)
With this in mind, I have two points to say to you:
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How can you be so sure the other person is delusional? Whatever one thinks about the underlying claim X, one would be wise to admit one’s own fallibility and thus uncertainty.
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If you are genuinely curious why someone else thought something, it would be better to not presuppose they are “delusional”. Doing that makes it very hard to curious and impairs a sincere effort to understand rather than dismiss.
Life presents many opportunities to recalibrate one’s thinking and reasoning. We all can speak and write more clearly. But the human ego will try to get in the way, so beware.
Endnotes
I intentionally wrote this article directed at you because I suspect you will take it more seriously. If simply directed it at someone on the Internet, it would be easy to say “oh, yeah, that’s wrong – but I’d never say something like that.”
To be clear, I’m not advocating that anything goes. There are objective facts in the world, and there are people who believe incorrect things. The point of the article is about the reflective process by which you sincerely try to understand the machinery by which someone else thinks.3
Yes, I say machinery because physicalism makes better predictions than magic or souls. We’re matter and energy all the way down.