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X Amish Atheist

~ fighting dogma from behind the lines…

X Amish Atheist

Tag Archives: belief system

Atheism vs. Christianity: The Insults aren’t Working

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Other

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

atheism, belief, belief system, Christianity, condescension, conversion, debate, insult, religion, worldview


When people believe that their worldviews are epistemologically superior to others (which most do), the temptation is high to disparage other worldviews with condescending insults. Atheists and Christians are equally guilty of this. Members of both sides are constantly attacking each other in an attempt to make the opposition appear ridiculous.

Insult against atheism

Insult against Christianity

Many atheists believe that Christians are stupid and vice versa. This belief is particularly present when in the middle of a heated debate with a member of the other side. Even I am often tempted to insult the intelligence of the other side until I remember that not too long ago, I was on their side.

It is a rather weird anecdote of human psychology that I, 1) Always consider myself intelligent, 2) Am constantly updating my belief system, and 3) Several months later I tend to think of anyone holding any of my old beliefs, as being “stupid”. It’s hypocrisy, I know, and it may just be me but I suspect it applies to many other people as well. It’s something I need to think about before silently or vocally insulting someone else’s intelligence.

Those insults do not help change the mind of the religious person or the atheist. I know this after experiencing both sides. All that an insult accomplishes is to anger the other person and destroy all chance of a continued dialogue. Insults probably do more harm than good.

As hard as it might be to believe, there really are intelligent Christians that wholeheartedly believe in the literal truth of the Bible. I should know–I used to be one. It is a testament to the power of indoctrination, and the atheist hoping to change religious minds would do well to understand this power. The Christian would do well to understand that the atheist is intelligent, and that he is also a seeker of truth, and not intrinsically evil.

Based once again only on my experience on both sides of the argument, here are some tips I have for encouraging a shift in a worldview. They will be written from the perspective of an atheist trying to change a Christian’s worldview.

1) Be an ethical and an intelligent person. Show the other side, by your speech and actions, that you’re not stupid or intrinsically evil.

2) Begin a dialogue. The tone of the dialogue is important. It should be friendly and never confrontational. Give the (truthful) impression that you are also seeking truth and not just manufacturing counter-arguments for the sake of disagreeing.

3) Take it slowly. It took me about ten years of thought to go from fundamental Christian (Amish) to atheist. What you’re seeking is a radical shift in worldview and it’s not going to happen overnight. In fact, if you throw too much “evidence” at the other side all at once, you’re more likely to push the other person away than to change their mind. Judge the other person’s position and level of knowledge and seek only a small victory in any given conversation. If you achieve it, leave it at that and let it ferment in the other person’s mind. Remember, you are trying to undermine years and years of indoctrination.

4) This may or may not be effective for everyone, but it seems to work for me: Guide the other person to the answer rather than giving it to them. I find that it is more effective to ask the right questions than it is to state the answers.

5) Provide well-written and easy to understand resources to help your fellow truth-seeker to understand the more technical aspects of your worldview. For example, several of Richard Dawkin’s books were instrumental in helping me understand evolution and grasping the general idea of evolution was a turning point in my transition from fundamental Christian to atheist.

So in conclusion; be nice. How nice? Pretend that the person you’re debating with is your best friend, your significant other, or your mother. They really are mine.

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Belief Systems: Coherency, Completeness, and Reality

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Epistemology, My Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

atheism, belief system, coherency, completeness, contradiction, God, reality, religion


Something that you believe is obviously a belief. To be more precise, a belief is a statement about the universe that the holder believes to hold true. The sum of all the things that you believe is your “belief system”. And, once again, to be more precise, a belief system is the sum of all statements that the holder believes to be individually true.

Everybody has a belief system. Without it, we wouldn’t have any way to make sense of anything from the smallest question such as ‘why does water flow downhill’, to the biggest of questions such as ‘what is the meaning of life’.

So what defines a good belief system and how could one belief system possibly be objectively better than another? There are three qualities of a belief system that are very important; coherency, completeness, and reality. I will explain these ideas in some detail below although not in the order just given.

Reality

The individual beliefs in a belief system must comport with reality. It is possible to have a completely fantastical belief system, only if you’re unlike most people (i.e. you’re completely insane).

What I mean is that your beliefs must agree with what you see in reality. If you stub your toe really hard and you firmly believe that you did not stub your toe, then your belief does not comport with reality (and you are most likely insane).

Such a belief system is useless because it does not help you make accurate predictions about the future. Life is all about making accurate predictions. For our entire lives, the sun has risen every morning. Based on this evidence, we form the belief that the sun will always come up in the morning. Based on this belief, whether or not we think about it, we make the prediction that the sun will come up tomorrow morning.

If for some reason, the sun stops rising in the morning, then our belief that the sun will always rise in the morning, does no longer comport with reality. When that happens we are forced to discard the belief and search for a new one. Perhaps we’ll revise our belief to ‘the sun sometimes rises in the morning’. If after a long period of not even that happening, we would be forced to revise it even further, to something like, ‘the sun used to rise in the morning’.

Coherency

Coherency is about how well one’s beliefs make sense when more than one at a time are considered. A coherent belief system is a belief system in which all the individual beliefs fit together in such a way as to create a solid whole. A belief system that contains contradictory beliefs is not coherent.

For example, suppose you held the bizarre belief that all Mennonites are weird. You also hold the belief that a certain friend named Sam is a cool dude and is not at all weird. Then you find out that Sam is a Mennonite. Suddenly you realize a contradiction in your belief system. On the one hand you believe all Mennonites are weird and on the other hand you believe that one Mennonite is not weird. These two beliefs do not fit together. Taken one at a time, they might make sense, but taking both at the same time results in a logical contradiction.

An incoherent belief system is bad. If you hold contradictory beliefs in your belief system it must logically be the case that at least one of your beliefs does not comport with reality. It is false. This tends to cause confusion and cognitive dissonance – neither of which are good attributes to possess in this complex life.

Finding contradictions in one’s belief system is actually quite common for the serious thinker. That’s because we are all operating on incomplete information. None of us knows everything and no matter how strongly we believe in something, new information could pop up which totally disproves our belief. Finding a contradiction can actually be a refreshing experience because it gives you the opportunity to explore intellectually and perhaps to happen upon bigger truths.

It is a common tactic for debaters (think atheist versus Christian) to attack the coherency of the other person’s belief system in an attempt to find and display a contradiction in the opponent’s belief system.

The important thing is that you remove the contradiction. Think about the conflicting beliefs because one of them must logically be false. Are all Mennonites really weird? Is Sam really a cool and completely non-weird guy? In your investigation into the basis of your opposing beliefs you may just stumble onto something new. Perhaps not all Mennonites are weird after all!

Completeness

The last quality of a belief system is “completeness”. This idea is related to how big your belief system is. Are there still questions that you don’t know the answer to? Of course there are! Our belief systems will probably always be incomplete but yours can be more complete than your neighbor’s.

The completeness of one’s belief system can be deceptive. This is particularly true when it comes to religion. Believing that God does literally everything is a pretty damn complete belief system isn’t it?

Well, no because as it turns out, this belief system actually just skips over everything. Take earthquakes for example. Years ago, many people thought God caused earthquakes and that was that. This idea was an explanation for earthquakes but it was useless. It was of no help in predicting earthquakes nor in gaining a better understanding of the overall workings of our planet. Nowadays we know about plate tectonics – how the plates move about on the Earth’s surface, grinding against each other, pressing against each other, and suddenly releasing tension. This explanation of earthquakes is more complete – it is more useful. It helps us predict earthquakes, it helps us gain a better understanding of how the Earth works as a whole, and it even helped explain several things in evolutionary theory that had previously been mysteries.

Updating Your Belief System

We are often given new information. Our job is to analyze that information and ask ourselves if it makes sense with what we can see of reality. If it does, we need to ask ourselves if it is coherent with our existing beliefs? If so, the information is quickly incorporated into one’s belief system but if not, the information must either be discarded as false or one’s belief system must be revised.

When it comes to larger chunks of information (such as the theory of evolution), it is wise to take a little more time to ensure that everything in the set of statements actually coincides with reality. If it does, then we need to check the internal coherency. Do all the statements within the set, make sense when taken as a whole (remember to disregard your own beliefs through this process)? If it comports with reality and has good internal coherency it is time to see how well it would fit with the rest of your belief system. If there are conflicts then things start getting interesting. On the one hand you have a scientific theory that explains reality quite well but on the other hand it doesn’t fit with your beliefs about the nature of reality.

Now you need to start thinking hard. Could you modify your existing beliefs enough so that evolution could fit inside without causing coherency problems? If so, would the resulting belief system be better than your current one? Would it be more coherent? More complete? If so, there’s only one viable option. Revise your current belief system enough so that you can import the new segment.

When I first studied the evidence for evolution I marveled at the how well it explained some of questions that I had often wondered about. It appealed to me because it mirrored reality so well and it was so much more complete than my existing beliefs on the subject – that God created man and all the animals. However, I couldn’t be expected to just drop the idea of God entirely. My beliefs about him were entwined with all the other beliefs in my belief system. So I started wondering if I could believe in both. As it turns out, I could – as soon as I re-interpreted the Bible as more of a metaphorical work than a literal work.

Rarely does a person’s entire belief system change overnight regardless of how much evidence is thrown at the person. It is often easier to live with contradictory beliefs than it is to completely switch a belief system. This is particularly true for belief systems that are well established in a person’s mind. I’m referring to religion and how it is often indoctrinated starting at a very young age.

Judging from my own experiences, I believe it is essentially impossible for a firm Christian to become an atheist in any short period of time (despite having been born atheist, mind you). For me the whole process took about 10 to 12 years.

So if you are intent on changing someone’s belief system – don’t try to do it overnight. Work on one or several beliefs at a time rather than the whole system at once. You increase your odds of eventually succeeding.

Note: In this last section, I have approached the issue of updating one’s belief system from the perspective of someone watching your mind (metacognition). When it happens to yourself, it will not seem quite this analytical. In fact, many of these steps will be taken by your mind without you even realizing it.

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Becoming an Atheist

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in The Conversion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

atheism, atheist, belief system, logic, rationalization


At first it starts with a nagging question – an inconsistency or a contradiction that you notice in your belief system.

Then you rationalize. It’s usually not that difficult to rationalize – to invent something that makes sense with the rest of your belief system. Your religious beliefs will survive this rationalization – they’ll just have to endure a minor tweak.

Then you have more nagging questions. You realize that even your tweaked belief system is not sufficient to withstand the inquiry of an intelligent mind. Frantically you make more rationalizations and for a time, everything makes sense again.

And then of course you hit upon a new idea and a new question pops up. Once again you rationalize. This process keeps going on for several years. Your belief system gains some patches and a whole lot of little tweaks. Your rationalizations have become quite complex.

At some point you suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are way different from that of everyone else around you. But this is fine, you’re comfortable with this because it makes you feel good to have calmed the cognitive dissonance with your rationalizations.

The questions don’t stop there. In fact, the more you learn about science and philosophy, the more questions you get and the harder they become. You start redefining your beliefs even more. Your God starts becoming smaller and smaller. What you’re doing is learning more and more about the universe and relegating God to the gaps in your knowledge. If you’re lucky, you will have started learning about logic and you will suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are based not on evidence but on arguments from ignorance.

Eventually, you realize that your belief system is the definition of “agnostic”. You don’t tell your friends about your new label but you don’t feel awfully guilty about your beliefs either. After all, what could be the harm in admitting that you don’t know?

Then you start playing devil’s advocate. You debate against your religious acquaintances hoping that they can prove to you that God really exists. They fail miserably.

Mentally you start scoffing at your friends’ beliefs whenever the subject of religion comes up. It is around this time that you realize what you’ve become. An atheist! Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel all that evil. You don’t suddenly have the urge to rape and to kill. Actually, you start feeling better about yourself once you realize that your morality is real and not just a fear of eternal torture.

Becoming an atheist is not a single decision that a person makes nor is it a single point in time. Becoming an atheist is a long journey that often happens over the course of many years. For me it was about 10-12 years from the first serious question I had to when I was first comfortable considering myself an atheist.

Just remember, you were born an atheist!

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