Thoughts on Faith, Fear and Rationality
Whenever someone tells you that the belief comes before the evidence - that you'll understand once you believe, you may be absolutely certain of two things:
First, this is a con. No one who has something legitimate to say will ask you to believe anything before the evidence and argument are presented.
Second, the con artist has no respect whatsoever for your intellect or self discipline. They have singled you out as vulnerable to their pitch - a mark, a pigeon, a sucker.
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Most people are not rational, they are rationalizers. They will break their stated rules, lie, cheat and double cross even those they claim to love if the incentive is sufficient, and will have themselves convinced that they were justified in doing so, that their victims had it coming, or that they "had no choice" before the body hits the floor.
To be rational is to consider one's actions and beliefs as clearly as possible, with the best data you can find without self-interest or prejudice. It's a learned skill, a discipline and one that must be practiced. Most people never learned it. They think that rationality means coming up with plausible reasons to do what they wanted to do anyway.
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Getting the vast majority of people to believe something has naught to do with arguments or evidence. You need only convince them that they want to believe your proposition - that they are a good person for believing it.
After that, they will defend the belief that allows them to think of themselves as a good person, even to the point of doing very, very bad things.
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I've said it before, but it will help you understand to remember that the more ridiculous the lie told by church or party, the more faith points you get inside the group for believing it.
You will never talk a true believer into honestly examining the beliefs of their group. They have been carefully taught that to do so is a sin - a lack of faith. They believe that their security is in obedience - in suppressing doubt in themselves and others.
Getting them to look at what they believe in a critical light will simply not happen until they start to question themselves. If and when they come to you, bewildered and asking questions, restoring them to the status of a thinking human being may be possible. But you can't doubt for them.
Until then, they're just faith zombies. And they will try to eat your brains. Stay out of reach.
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Faith Traps and Fear Traps
We are all, to some degree, vulnerable to certain mental cul-de-sacs that keep us from seeing clearly. The two most common are what I call "faith traps" and "fear traps."
Faith traps are created when someone adopts a maxim that they believe it is morally imperative to hold. If you believe this, you are a good person. If you don't, you're not. Never mind that just believing something is worthless, that belief in itself has no merit whatsoever. Even the good book of the faithful says so:
"What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead...
...You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?"
- James 2:14-20
An example of the sort of faith trap that I'm describing is adopting the maxim, "Everything works out for the best!" this is a maxim that people will encourage you to adopt, believe, and shove upon others.
I have seen people pushing this in a chemo clinic, going so far as to blame those who die for their lack of a "positive mental attitude." I have heard people shove this at people who are at the graveside of their child.
The problem, of course, is that everything does not work out for the best. Tragic things, evil things, plain unlucky things happen all the time. So the compulsive optimist is forced to explain them.
This will usually come down to blaming the victim. The "Brightsiding" scam, in which misfortune is put down to not being enough of a sunshiny glow monkey and "attracting negativity" has already been described, but you never need look far for a reason to blame the subject of misfortune.
What you can't do is be rational about it. Because to do so would be to acknowledge that things don't always work out for the best, and if you don't believe they do, well, then you're not a good person anymore.
Optimists are some of the most ruthless people I've ever met.
Likewise, pessimists, nihilists, &c. are forced into irrational contortions to explain why some things do work out, why there are kind, just and thoughtful people, and why there are moments of grace in this tired old world.
They can't acknowledge exceptions, because to do so would invalidate their gloomy maxims. And that would make them less than the edgelords they purport to be.
The problem here is that the maxim is more important than seeing clearly. The believer's identity is wrapped up in their belief, so they can't see past it.
The fear trap happens when the believer becomes focused on a possible negative outcome to the degree that they can't see anything else. "What if I move to the city to take this new job, but it doesn't work out and I get fired and I have no friends there and...and...and..." down into a spiral of imagined catastrophe.
The fear is so dire, so big that it is impossible for the person caught in the fear trap to rationally analyze the situation or the odds of the catastrophe happening.
I know people who will not visit us in Ecuador because "what if a volcano or an earthquake happens?" The chances of being affected by a volcano or an earthquake during a week's visit are ridiculously small, but the potential outcome is so dire, they can't see past it.
Be aware of faith traps and fear traps, and first learn to recognize them in your own thought process.
Own your head.
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The ruthlessness and amorality of those caught in a faith trap can be breathtaking. When the Lieutenant Governor of Texas blamed the lack of prayer in schools for the Uvalde school shooting, claiming that god did not intervene because he is not allowed in schools, and then this incredible heresy was repeated from pulpits and Fox News desks, despite my experience with such Pharisees, I was gobsmacked.
What does this say about your god? He let twenty people, most of them children be massacred because he didn't like the way we read the Constitution? And what does it say about you, that you'd follow such a god?
Leave aside that there was probably more heartfelt prayer in that school once the gunfire started going off than there is in any church on any Sunday. Also, that individual prayer is not, and has never been illegal in the schools. Of course the facts don't matter.
Politicians and preachers build pulpits out of the bloody corpses of children. And they feel justified in doing so, because, above all, their irrational beliefs must be defended. And do so in the face of a school massacre - standing before bereaved parents and a grief-stricken community and trying to convince anyone that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good deity watching all this must be quite a task.
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You can't defend irrationality rationally. Therefore, irrationality is defended irrationally, even furiously.
People defending an irrational belief can justify any behavior in doing so. You would do well to walk wide of them, especially when they gather.
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"Who are you just a man to question God?"
We're the only ones who can. What do you expect, theologically inquisitive penguins?
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