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Moss_Piglet comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is there a name for this following bias?
So I've debated a lot of religious people in my youth, and a common sort of "inferential drift", if you can call if that, is that they believe that if you don't think something is true or doesn't exist, then this must mean that you don't want said thing to be true or to exist. It's like a sort of meta-motivated reasoning; they are falsely attributing your conclusions due to motivated reasoning. The most obvious examples are reading any sort of Creationist writing that critiques evolution, where they pretty explicitly attribute accepting the theory of evolution to a desire for god to not exist.
I've started to notice it in many other highly charged, mind-killing topics as well. Is this all in my head? Has anyone else experienced this?
I used to get a lot of people telling me I was an atheist because I either didn't want there to be a god or because I wanted the universe to be logical (granted, I do want that, but they meant it in the pejorative Vulcan-y sense). I eventually shut them up with "who doesn't want to believe they're going to heaven?" but it took me a while to come up with that one.
I don't understand it either, but this is a thing people say a lot.