Believers accept as true whatever harms their enemies’ cause

Evidence

The most probable explanation of what happened must be that Christians thought that whatever tended to harm the enemies of truth was likely itself to be true. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1372

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact, near-universal account of motivated cognition: usefulness-for-the-cause as an epistemic truth-criterion. Resists easy summary because it sits at the intersection of psychology, anthropology of religion, and epistemology.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s material on media/information bias and to contemporary motivated-reasoning research — the medieval polemicist’s logic is the same structure as modern partisan information processing. — connects to: Hostile writers assumed what harms an enemy’s cause is automatically true.