Thanks for this. I was beginning to think I was going crazy; it's good to know I'm not the only one in the world outside my social circle with approximately this set of views.

To give /u/Tom_Bombadil credit, he is acting as a rational actor would if they had a ridiculously high certainty of everything they believe in (I'm talking tens of nines here). The amount of evidence required to get to such a point, however, is astronomical – if every single Jewish person in the world individually walked up to him and promised him that they were part of a conspiracy to take over the world, then it might be enough evidence to be that certain… but he clearly doesn't have that much evidence or we'd all be convinced by now.

The only solutions that I can think of are:

• He determined this certainty before he became an approximately rational actor, and so should re-evaluate these beliefs in light of this incongruity.
• He isn't an approximately rational actor.
• This is one of his axioms; he's assigned a probability of 1 to it and literally infinite evidence is required to convince him otherwise.

I've probably missed something here; if I've made a faulty assumption or a faulty leap in thought please let me know.