Crystal healing and the P12

I was waiting for a P12 to take me past Cathay Street when I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. I’d checked online, but the schematic on the bus stop, which showed the bus only going as far as New Cross, didn’t tally with my expectations. I dealt with the cognitive dissonance between my beliefs about where the bus was heading and its actual destination by standing there, monitoring a rising tide of mild panic. I should have remembered something I’d heard on the radio, when Studs Terkel quoted James Cameron’s last column: “hope subsides, curiosity remains”.

Hope that I was on the right route was indeed fading fast, but my curiosity kicked in and I made enquiries. A woman confirmed that I was mistaken about the P12: it was the P13 I wanted. The slight inconvenience of having to check the facts and the epistemic (if hardly epic) humiliation at being proved wrong were more than compensated for by the resolution of that dissonant state of mind and a feeling of relief at being able to get on with my day.

Later that week my wife attended a family funeral, and met a women she didn’t know who commented on the amethyst necklace she was wearing. Amethysts, apparently, are “very healing”. The moment passed without my wife pulling out a copy of Trick or Treatment and reading chapter and verse on all things alternative. Sometimes in social situations it seems best to pull a veil over the elephant in the room. (Sceptics should of course be wary of veils, given how useful they are to purveyors of bullshit, as Stephen Law (2011b, pp. 35–36) explains in a section on the Veil Analogy.)

With the benefit of hindsight and from within the safety of a hypothetical, I imagined my wife saying, calmly, and with sincere concern for the woman’s well-being, “You realize those things don’t actually work? I mean, I’d hate you to get sick because you didn’t see a doctor.”

Now imagine if someone had come up to me at the bus stop and said, “You know this bus doesn’t actually go beyond New Cross? I mean, I’d hate for you to be late for an appointment because you got on the wrong bus.”

Here are two possible responses:

• “I don’t care what you think about it, I’m not going to change my belief about the P12.”
• “Thank you for taking the trouble to point out my false belief about the P12, I really appreciate it.”

One of these responses would be thought of by most people as bordering on the rude if not downright insane. The question is, why is that same kind of response perfectly acceptable when beliefs held on faith are challenged?