"On most complicated issues, we go with what other people think -- or if we want to look into it a bit more closely, look at what experts think. You believe in the Big Bang, you believe in plate tectonics, you believe that Obama was born in the USA, and unless you are a religious fundamentalist, you believe in the theory of evolution. Most of us believe those things because people we respect believe them. That is as it should be."

Couldn't be more wrong.

Most of us start out adopting common views around us.

Fortunately we arrive early at the fact that those we respect on some views are dead wrong on others. And unless we're raised in a cult, we must confront the fact that far too many of our neighbors subscribe to differing mutually contradictory beliefs.

Even before we understand how Democrats and Republicans disagree, long before we know what doctrinal differences separate Reform Jews from Lutherans we know that going along is not an option.

Fortunately, if we're lucky, our schooling is giving us skills to use to evaluate and come to independent conclusions. To replace belief with fact and evidence. Freethinking is so written into the curriculum that we are taught to admire Galileo and the Founding Fathers for their dissent from popular views.

Later we come to the understanding that popularity is irrelevant to the truth or even to the evaluation of a claim. That replacing logic with respect and popularity will lead astray as often as it leads towards issues of value.

We come to understand that on many issues "belief" is irrelevant. You can believe all you want to that NYC is the capital of New York, but that belief is unwarranted and false. And that there is more to evaluating it as a claim than allowing both sides their 20 minutes of debate, or in tallying up the number of takers each view has.

And we understand that the person who asks us to abandon critical standards and scientific methods in order to appeal to respect and popularity never has our best interests at heart.

"For each individual question, you should continue to figure the majority and the experts are right unless you have a strong reason to disbelieve them. "

Burden of proof?

When all the experts are admitting a missing mechanism and either hoping to find it or have given up the search for lack of evidence, then presuming its existence without proof is absurd. Sure, it is popularly believed, just as Satanic Ritual Child Abuse rings were a few decades back.

But the belief in the unproven, even by the respected and popular was eventually undone by those demanding proof of the claim.

Ultimately what you believe and why is both illiterate and irrelevant. Because ultimately it seems possible that you will be brought around, at least in grudging admission, when an authority sides against you.

Your blinking incomprehension at the APA's recent decision, and your refusal to actually apply it doesn't mask that you must recognize when the tide has turned against you.

We will leave it to others who can actually comprehend and evaluate to have seen it coming long ago and to take stances that don't just admit it as an abstract claim, but which are derived from the facts behind it.

And, of course, we must leave it to others to fight against the Satanic Panic type myths you would exploit. For our allies there is a large body of literature, and there is science and logic.

For yours there are pitchforks and torches, and the wisdom of the angry mob.

Dante