From: hartigan@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: And over to you, Sean...
Date: 31 Dec 92 01:23:16 -0400
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

In article <adams.725740367@spssig>, adams@spss.com (Steve Adams) writes:
> 
> In which Sean decides that I'll make a great subject for his psychology
> class...

You know, I never did take a psychology class, although I have read a little
about the psychology of religious belief. As for your value as a subject
of study...well, I'm still here. :)

> Re: accepting Jesus (ie "stop saying 'no'")

>>Could you make an effort of will and reject the evidence? You said that
>>you couldn't will yourself to accept Ahura Mazda -- could you
>>will yourself to accept atheism? And if you could, wouldn't you _know_
>>deep down that you were lying to yourself?
>
> No. Yes.  I don't think I could will myself into disbelief, and were I to
> do so, I'd still have that nagging cognitive dissonance.

Do you have this sense of dissonance now, considering all the things we've
talked about, the atheist arguments on the net, etc? If not,
this leads to an interesting point. I'm still trying to work this out
in my head, but I'm thinking more and more that intellectual concerns
are largely irrelevant to the question of belief/unbelief.

You know at least as much as I do about the historical data regarding
Xianity.  But we give differing amounts of weight to the same 
pieces of evidence, and you know, I think the reasons are not
rational. Emerson called temperament the "iron string" upon which the
beads of experience are strung. Hmmm...


>>You know, you _conceded_ back then that free will was a myth. Have you
>>changed your mind?
>
> I don't know.  I haven't come upon anything I like better, and
> predestination is worse...;-)  Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

To my mind, this is a sign that the dilemma is a false one. That is, there
is a third option which resolves this contradiction, i.e. the doctrine is
false.  It does not check out with reality in either case -- free will
is a myth, as we agreed, and predestination is inconsistent with your
perception of what you call "God." 

Consider the Paulist salvation doctrine as a scientific hypothesis. 
The only means we have to test it are our perceptions. In both possible
forms (free will/predest.) the hypothesis does not agree with the
experimental data. We need another hypothesis: is there another acceptable
way to formulate the doctrine that avoids this dilemma? 
   
>>For me to accept Jesus wholeheartedly, I would have to act in "bad faith,"
>>in effect, deny and repress my intellectual integrity and accept a doctrine
>>that does not appear to me to be true.
>
> I don't think this is what God wants...what God wants, at least in my
> opinion, is our love, worship and obedience.

How does a person like myself fit in to this program? In order to do what
God wants I'd have to act in "bad faith," I'd have to suppress my
sense of intellectual integrity.  Why would God create a person who
was _incapable_ of doing what was required for salvation?  

As I'm sure you're sensing, this is starting to look like predestination
again, isn't it?  I ask out of curiosity: is there _really_ no escape
from this rather bleak point of view?

 
Re: psychoanalyzing Steve :)
 
>>What is it exactly, if I may ask, that you are holding on to so tightly?
>
> Obsessive compulsive disorder? ;-)  In any event, I guess the answer comes
> down to wanting to believe, in spite of everything that my intellect tells
> me is contradictory.  Stubborn, I guess.  More or less a reverse of Picard
> and the Cardassians - I see 5 lights, when there are only 4.

I guess this explains why you keep coming back for more of my abuse...;)
Is it the nagging sense of congnitive dissonance, the psychological
discomfort that goes along with "bad faith" that drives you to try and find
a way of resolving this tension in yourself?  You want to find a way
to bring your intellect into line with your convictions?  Just making
a quasi-educated guess. 
 
Note: this is the opposite of how I'd do it -- I'd try to bring my 
convictions into line with my intellect, but chacun son gout...

> I don't know *why* I believe, I just *do*.  As I said, I want to, in some
> strange way.  Perhaps it is as you said, that ultimate fear is comforted by
> such ideas...

My guess would be that belief seems to offer you a relief from 
existential anxiety, that is to say, the reaction of the rational mind to the 
dual incomprehensibilities of Life and Death.

Just rephrasing your comment really.
 
Re: Bible stories fictional?

>>Why do you think the Bible is inspired, knowing what you know? Is this
>>another _a priori_ thing that one has to accept wholeheartedly?
> 
> It's a position I've come to...I didn't use to believe this.  But the more
> I read and study and the more I see, the more convinced I am that it is.
> Strange, eh?  This generally brings people *away* from that position.  Not
> me.  Just strange, I guess.

I think your vision of Christianity is loose enough that you aren't put
off by the historical questions that alienate more literal-minded people.
In such a case, your _a priori_ belief in a Biblically-derived God would
naturally lead you to interpret the Bible in a manner consistent with this
belief. Thus the whole thing would look more and more "true" the more
you worked at interpreting it (i.e. read it in the light of your 
_a priori_ belief).  Make sense?


 Re: The delusional nature of sincere belief
 
>>>Of course, at this point, I don't want to, as I'm sure you realize.
>>>Someday, perhaps, but I don't know that I AM wearing a blindfold...
>>
>>Understood. This is the hard part. But I'm getting the feeling that
>>you don't feel unduly constricted by your imaginative world, so hey...
>
> That's true...my positions don't constrain me...nor do they prevent my
> examining positions other than my own to test them against my own personal
> hypothesis.  I'm not scared of contradictory ideas...

Actually, that response is a great example of what I mean. You thought
I meant _intellectually_ constrained. I meant _experientially_
constrained. In other words, I found that having my experience narrowed
so intensely into the imaginative realm (as Xianity requires) was
an unbearable mode of life -- it wasn't worth living. 

You on the other hand, not only don't find this narrowing unbearable,
you _like_ it, and you really don't see that it _is_ a narrowing.
To you (as it did for me), it seems like the whole world. But because
I couldn't stand it, I had to find out if that were true, or kill
myself.  Because you _like_ it, you have no desire to find out if
your life is "all there is." 
 
This is the whole difference between us in a nutshell...:)
 
>>>This sort of confirms your point, eh?  One tangible thing to hold on to in
>>>the face of the loss of everything else.
>>
>>Sure, yup. This is exactly what I mean. It's comforting, isn't it?
> Yes, it is.

So comforting, in fact, that the pleasure of having that belief outweighs
the discomfort of the cognitive dissonance that the belief causes
for a person like yourself. So the intellect yields...

>>I'll come back to my original point -- maybe Xianity is true, maybe it isn't.
>>But there is no way to know. Personally, I can't stand living in an
>>ideological box. It is too much of a narrowing of experience...I hate it.
>>And one doesn't have to do it! Hurray! So I'll play out here for now...
>
> Hmm...to me, Christianity is not limiting...it is freeing.  Strange, eh?

Well, not really. You are mellow enough that your Xianity is not 
_intellectually_ constraining_ (well, not unbearably so, anyway :).
The kind of limitation I mean is described in the earlier 
remarks I made on "constraint." 

>>You want to live inside the box, hey, no skin off my nose. And methinks
>>you do, comrade...:)
>
> Perhaps so, but the box is illusionary and not so limiting as you might
> think.

Well, intellectually, I agree. You are a pretty open-minded ideologue...
I was thinking about freedom from the limitations of being an ideologue. :)
 
> I like the Becket quote...;-)

Gee, thanks! Here's another...:)

Hamm (anguished): What's happening? What's happening?
Clov: Something is taking its course. 
                                       (from _Endgame_)

Sean Hartigan
hartigan@ac.dal.ca