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brainoil comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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Not necessarily. The vast majority of propositions are false. Most of them are obviously false; we don't need to spend much mental energy to reject the hypothesis that "Barack Obama is a wooly mammoth," or "the moon is made of butternut squash." "Absurd" is a useful label for statements that we can reject with minimal mental effort. And it makes sense that we refuse to consider most such statements; our mental time and energy is very limited, and if we want to live productive lives, we have to focus on things that have some decent probability of being true.
The problem is not denominating certain things as absurd, it is rejecting claims that we have reason to take more seriously. Both evolution and Christianity are believed by large enough communities that we should not reject either claim as "absurd." Rather, when many people believe something, we should attend to the best arguments in favor of those beliefs before we decide whether we disagree.
But you don't reject the hypothesis that "Barack Obama is a wooly mammoth" because it's absurd - nobody has seriously presented it. If someone had a reason to seriously present it, then I'd not dismiss it out of hand - if only because I was interested enough to hear it in the first place, so would want to see if the speaker was making a clever joke, or perhaps needed immediate medical care. As EY might say, noticing a hypothesis is unlikely enough in the first place that you should probably pay some attention to it, if the speaker was one of the people you listen to. cf. Einstein's Arrogance
David Icke thinks Barack Obama and many other prominent politicians are reptiles and that there's a reptilian conspiracy going on. He has written many books about this, and seems to take all of that pretty seriously. Should I be reading his books, instead of something that is more likely to be true?