Dawn Eden has a weird tendency to quote her own, personal feelings about any issue as evidence of the truth of factual claims she makes – often about other people’s feelings on that same issue. She thinks not merely that how she feels should dictate other people’s behavior (that’s just right wing politics in a nutshell), or even that how she feels should dictate actual facts about the world (right-wing science in a nutshell). Eden has expanded the shell of her nuttiness to include the apparent belief that her feelings both give her epistemological access to, and serve as a norm for, other people’s beliefs and values. She is constantly describing the mental contents, and emotional states, of people she clearly doesn’t understand on issues she can barely discuss coherently, and then relying on her own delusional descriptions as factual evidence for moral conclusions about those people and the topic at hand.

That’s . . . odd. (And let me say that, aside from the sheer reality-defying oddness of it, the emotional states of a woman who bursts into tears in church and sobs continuously through half the service because . . . someone making announcements talked too fast . . . are an especially dubious source of moral or epistemological norms. I hope she doesn’t get around to reading my mind, because I’d hate to suddenly find myself behaving like that.)

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