Today's word of the day (at dictionary.com) is timely. No, not the word "timely," but the timely word "tenet" [TEN-it, noun], defined as "any opinion, principle, dogma, belief, or doctrine that a person holds or maintains as true."
A tenet, in the context of my previous post in which I stated that the probability value of a belief is less than 1 and more than 0, is a belief to which the believer in effect assigns a value of 1. It doesn't mean that the belief is in fact true, but only that, for the person holding the belief as a tenet, it is true. He acts as though it is true.
He might even become fanatical about it, although that is not necessary. I think it is possible, for example, for a person to hold as a tenet that Jesus was the Son of God, died for our sins, and rose again (a timely observation, given that we're now only two days away from Good Friday), and yet believe that the Prophet Muhammad was, as Muslims believe, a Messenger of God. Believe it, that is, in a fifty-fifty way of noncommitality that doesn't lead the person to throw himself down in prayer toward Mecca whenever the Muslims do.
Or vice versa: That a tenet-holding Muslim (and I'm getting the impression from my reading that Muslims as a group tend to be a good deal more "tenet-holding" than Christians as a group) could "believe fifty-fifty" that Jesus was the Son of God, etc.
Hmm, well, maybe not....
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