Dot Calm's Page of Truth & Sedition: Strong belief, weak belief, provisional belief

I have a Tea Party Christian friend who is completely defensive about his beliefs.

If you question his politics--I don't even mean challenge...just ask a question to understand what he thinks--he starts yelling and screaming.

If you question his religion--again, I don't even mean challenge...just probe to understand what he thinks and why he thinks it--he starts yelling and screaming.

And woe to you if you do actually challenge his politics or religion. Just hint, infer, to him that he is wrong, and he will really fly off the handle.

It is so not pretty.

People like him...

People like Carly Fiorina who fabricate lies from whole cloth for their personal agendas...

Evangelists, televangelists, priests, and preachers who lie for God...

All suffer from weak belief.

Their beliefs are dead wrong, and they know it--they just haven't admitted it to themselves.

These fundamentalists are the most unreasonable people you will ever meet. Don't expect to convince them, but don't give up trying. Keep talking. Discuss--gently, respectfully--whatever you can with them. Maybe that light bulb will go on someday; if not, at least you tried.

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I have a Catholic friend who can listen to questions and challenges of his religion and politics and discuss them all calmly and rationally.

He has what I call strong beliefs. He is comfortable with what he believes and has no need to get defensive.

He is infinitely more reasonable than the people with weak beliefs, but he still misses the boat.

He believes what he wants to believe--for example, whatever bad science his parish priest tells him--without question until challenged.

For example, until you challenge him, he believes the Catholic Church when they tell him that condoms spread AIDS.

Unlike the fundies, he is not proof to science. He can be convinced.

But, if you watch closely, you will see magical thinking and other holes in his reasoning and logic just like you do with fundies.

This is what happens when you convince yourself that something you know isn't true IS true.

It happens whether you do it only a few times to create strong beliefs or whether you do it all day every day to maintain weak beliefs.

In forcing yourself to believe, you create a Trojan horse in your bullshit filters.

You make yourself gullible.

You believe unreasonable things that are completely unrelated and unintentional to that which you first forced yourself to believe.

You accept without question things that more rational, reasonable people know at a glance can't be true.

And you don't even realize you are doing it!

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I speak from experience. I was devoutly religious until a few things happened:

0. Someone challenged my beliefs and got me thinking about what I believed and why I believed it.

1. I saw that religion does not help people behave better or live more "godly" lives. My church proved that it was far more immoral than I could ever be. How shitty does a religion have to be to condone and promote victimizing innocent people? Like televangelists caught with their pants down or their hands in the till, they were only sorry that they got caught!

2. I read the Bible. How shitty does God have to be to take away someone's free will in order to give Himself an excuse to destroy the entire nation's first-born males (because females are only property anyway)? He did not pass over the sons of the Egyptian slave girls, who were innocent of enslaving the Jews. I concluded that that Thing was no god worthy of worship. It is a moral monster worthy only of disgust! Even the New Testament god is reprehensible. What just or merciful Divine Parent would inflict infinite torture (hell) for finite crime? What just or merciful Heavenly Father would condemn the female half of his creation to permanent servitude and subservience? What just or merciful Creator would condemn people just for being what he created them to be--human? The Abrahamic god is a psychopath. He is equally extreme and mercurial in the bounty he lavishes undeserved on his darlings (who are often psychopathic like him) and in the punishment he smites undeserved on those who displease him (e.g., by not worshiping him exactly how and how much he demands). I can't tell the difference between him and a petty warlord like Saddam Hussein. Throughout my life, I had believed in a loving merciful God who was a better person than I was. The God of the Bible was a complete contradiction to that God. I realized that both could not be true. It wasn't long afterward that I realized that both were nonsense, created by humans (the Bible's authors, the churches, and us believers).

3. I did some research. I found natural explanations for the religious experiences I had had as a believer, and I found reasonable doubt for the historicity of biblical figures like Jesus and Moses.

It was a process for me. Individual pieces fell away by chunks here and there, but it took years for the whole house of cards to come crashing down.

I look back now and am embarrassed. I fell into every trap of gullibility that belief creates. I shudder to think of the life choices I made while so impaired by self-imposed unreality.

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So, what happens when the scales fall off your eyes and you find yourself no longer gullible--no longer willing to take someone else's word for anything?

If you are a good skeptic, you step into provisional belief.

Being a good skeptic is not about simply dismissing as untrue everything you hear or read.

I admit to acting like I dismiss out of hand whatever my Tea Party Christian friend says because he has proven himself both not credible and incapable of having a rational, intelligent discussion; however, I still remember that, even with his track record, there is a chance that he may be right about some things.

So, what am I really doing? I weigh what he says against his track record for providing accurate information (as I find in multiple, credible, objective sources--yes, you have to research your sources, too), and I believe or disbelieve accordingly. If something he says sounds credible, I may take it as a provisional belief until I can look it up.

I adopt provisional beliefs for topics I haven't researched in depth yet. And I revise those beliefs as I obtain more information. Given just how much information is out there, I find it hard to develop strong beliefs any more. I know I'll never be able to research and understand everything I want to fully.

It's a lot harder to fool someone who is consciously using Bayes theorem (we all do it, but most of the time we're not even aware we are) and constructing provisional beliefs to understand the universe. This is exactly the approach scientists use, and it is why scientists tend to be skeptical until they see evidence.

It's a lot harder to manipulate such a person using emotional arguments or fear.

So, at this point, I have to say that the world makes a lot more sense and that I am a lot more comfortable in my ability to assess it accurately when I deliberately keep my mind open and my beliefs provisional.

Richard Carrier on using Bayes theorem to analyze history: