π Atheism Is Hard, Skepticism is Hard, but Escaping Religious Indoctrination was Harder
Last Updated: 1Β year, 3Β months ago
So why does some Spirituality, rooted in the Supernatural, still appeal to me?
So, I'm an atheist skeptic, like full-on Carl-Sagan-fan-type skeptic.
And yet.
And yet I found myself surprised by how watching this video by one of my favourite1 skeptic/atheist call-in shows, Skeptic Generation, somehow actually made me cry, in a good way.
It made me cry because I want that.
So, what I was raised with, the abusive and the lack of autonomy I do not want. Sacrificing myself for someone else's status quo I do not want.
But I am finally starting to see why some people do "choose" to enter a cult - or rather, are somehow sucked in because something appeals to a core need of theirs, for security, belonging, love, safety, validation, purpose...
I want to be able to embrace a belief just like that. I would like to be a witch. I want to and I feel like I would belong. I relate to so much of the culture and the ideology behind it.
But I can't, because to me something like this, much as it's about culture, still feels like for me it would have to involve having some level of belief in the supernatural - the belief that those rituals are affecting the world around me in some way, without any scientific evidence to back up their efficacy, to be literally holding a belief in something that has not substantiated itself.
And I just don't.
Learning Skepticism
Getting back to Carl Sagan.
I loved his masterpiece of reason and research, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark and I'd say it certainly changed my life for the better.
Besides being enthralling (no pun intended) and challenging and debunking so many so-called supernatural and otherwise fantastical claims which have become urban legends in society through commendable research and attention to detail, it also encouraged me to resist the urge to appeal to the supernatural myself as an answer to the as-yet unknown (by me at least) as well as to challenge the pressure to accept the sanctity of anti-scientific "personal beliefs".
This applied to both those my mind found hard to swallow2 but thought wrong to challenge and those my mind found too easy to swallow.
Challenging the former would be a struggle due to:
A) the neuronormative and cult-conditioned fear and shame I'd learned for exposing my apparent ignorance and depravity of what were considered commonsense knowledge and/or universally moral principles or
B) the misguided idea I was "respecting personal beliefs", and my fear and abuse-trained fawn response making it easy for more dominant and less empathetic personalities to weaponise that, and silencing my speaking out or diluting my words into a completely meaningless feel-good message.
Nowadays I'm getting better and better at actively challenging these claims, particularly those I consider dangerously unscientific.
The latter would be messages that I myself greedily gobbled up as truth, confirming my biases and affirming my identity and sense of purpose and justifying my sense of "rightness" in my beliefs and actions.
This used to be something I did all too easily, but ever since leaving the cult and first beginning to deconstruct my faith, I feel that I have a tendency to lean too far towards listening to and deferring to others' input due to a fear of becoming unreachable and no longer susceptible to feedback and ultimately winding up bigoted and/or narcissistic.
Decreasing confidence in myself and having purposely preferred jobs where I work under others in order to learn from mentorship, I've observed what happens when people in authority stop listening to feedback and fall out of touch with those they lead, hence my possibly being too eager to seek out feedback without boundaries.
Being seen as an authority figure tends to make me panic for this and other reasons, except when there is some kind of crisis, as I have learned to be quite adept at taking control in emergencies when nobody else is managing a situation.
Still, I feel that this leaning "too far" towards feedback has been generally beneficial for me, and I suspect that the real boundary should be in terms of how I process it rather than censoring it... With the exception of clearly bad faith or abusive feedback, and, I have had to learn, there are times (like lately) when my mental health can only handle so much negativity.
And working through Rejection-Sensitivity Dysphoria is also a big factor for me.
And yet.
Part of me wishes I could indulge in a supernatural belief, and fool myself with no consequences.
Do People "Choose to believe" (or Disbelieve) "because it gives them comfort?
Atheists often claim that Christians believe "because it gives them comfort". Christians often claim people lost their faith "because they want to sin". Both3 "sides" of this assume that the other is "taking the easy way" and this is a very convenient way to simply dismiss the other as immoral (with different definitions of morality) and acting in bad faith, or disingenuously.
Ironically, my beliefs WEREN'T comforting to me. Certainly not the literal belief that some of my friends were going to be tortured in hell for eternity and that it was all because I didn't have the "courage" or "strength of conviction" (aka "moral fortitude") to hound them into a conversion, or to give up my entire future aspirations to become a missionary, however impractical that may have been for me (particularly as I was still in school and this wasn't up to me).
Those beliefs I believed because I was immersed in the cult and what they taught me. Ie, I literally believed, I did not choose to believe or even want to believe much of what I was taught. Wanting did not factor in as an option if it was allegedly the "truth".
Hence, I believed in a young (6000-year-old) earth, through the bad data I had available and the deep-set biases implanted in my brain since childhood to cling to what was posited as "creation science", combined with a well-developed lack of critical thinking skills.
You heard me correctly - the lack of critical thinking skills in cult victims (and victims of indoctrination in general, if you don't like the word "cult") is intentional. Not intentional by the victim, mind you, or at least not consciously so and not seen as such. Rather, it is "faith", and seen as a virtue, and often the lack of it is seen as exactly what will send you to eternal torment in Hell.
Now on those poor critical thinking and information literacy skills.
Fearing Punishment for "Losing Faith" Hijacks Critical Thinking Ability
This was the hurdle I had to overcome in order to begin my deconstruction:
Regarding Information Illiteracy:
Bible messages surrounding how we should trust in "God's wisdom" as being superior to what we read or discover elsewhere were amplified, the message of anti-intellectualism was encouraged.
Popularised was the idea that we must "become like little children", as per the metaphor in Matthew 18:1-5. Though the original passage is actually talking about not valuing powerful positions over others but taking on a lowly rank, it is often preached as having blind trust like that of a child, extolled as "true faith" in God.
The idea was that seeking external knowledge, or "man's wisdom" was pursuing secularism instead of pursuing God and was inferior to God and ultimately sinful. If you kept pursuing critical thinking, you really had to question your motives because your heart was clearly sinful in "tempting you" away through the "deception" of Satan, the "prince of this world" instead of trusting in the good and holy message of God, and possibly your lustful human heart was the reason, because you WANTED to pursue a sinful lifestyle.
Thus you learned to "guard your heart" (ie self-censor and self-police) against any information that came from outside the cult if your leaders did not approve it as being "of God" (ie: might undermine their teachings and authority over you).
Regarding Poor Critical Thinking:
It's hard to reason critically when your knee-jerk reaction becomes to push away any doubts in isolation and trauma-suppress and forget them before they can form coherent thoughts let alone pile up into a cohesive counter-argument.
And the way this subconscious reflex is instilled? Simple: as I said above: if you lose your faith you displease God, you are immoral and in many versions of this belief you literally go to Hell to be tortured for all eternity.
Too many skeptics brush over this factor, which changes everything when trying to have a good-faith debate. Instead of moving on to a debate, they should pause on asking the theist if they hold this belief.
If they hold this belief, this is something that has to be addressed FIRST, because the underlying fear of punishment for asking questions and potentially allowing doubt to linger IS what keeps this group of theists in line.
The fear is hijacking rationality.
What you are reasoning with is not reason, it is fear-conditioning through abuse.
If someone was taught as a child that to raise their hand with a difficult question that challenged the speaker's authority (which the speaker then reframed as challenging God's authority) is shameful and wrong and could cause them to suffer eternally, and if they believe it, then:
A) Avoiding the questions whether by deflection, goalpost-shifting, or avoiding engaging at all.
B) Bad-faith arguing They won't truly, openly listen to and consider the answer but use special pleading arguments or argue ad-nauseum only keep thinking of ways that it should be countered, even if these answers don't make sense due to arguing without even listen to the answer (given it is a fear-response not based on rationality).
Often B) is done to maintain cognitive dissonance in holding a certain view while still claiming a "100% literal" interpretation of the Bible as God-inspired and the belief that all of God's commands are perfectly good/moral and should be obeyed.
A perfect example of a situation where fear triggers lack of comprehension to a nonsensical degree is this video from another call-in show.
Here, a repeat caller keeps trying to redefine slavery and arguing that the Bible doesn't address it. Even when the host directly reads the bible verses and gets the caller to read them the caller continues arguing with the existence of direct quotes, because in his mind, The Bible is the literal word of God, all of God's word must be obeyed, and the Bible is a guide for morality. Since he has been unable to justify slavery in a previous video, therefore the Bible CANNOT sanction slavery, even if the Bible is proven to sanction slavery the proof itself that he is seeing must not exist.
Since all attempts at B) (bad faith arguments) fail, the caller returns to strategy A) and drops the call.
Here's the thing: you can't have a good-faith debate if you truly believe in divine punishment for losing faith.
Your response HAS to be to metaphorically block your ears and argue in bad faith no matter what. It is literally synonymous with defending your faith and belief, with not renouncing God. The mere act of questioning is a sin, the very worst sin, some would argue this is the Unforgivable Sin, the type that can condemn you.
We are taught to detach from our own doubts, hell even from our own bodies' basic needs and feelings of discomfort, and as a result of that detachment I still have trouble recognising even basic things like whether I'm feeling discomfort, even bodily physical discomfort like feeling cold.
Is it any wonder then, when fear of hellish consequences keeps us purposely so detached from our own brain's safety mechanisms, that bad-faith arguments abound to stave off the deadly doubts?
Skepticism can feel burdensome, but believing Lies has a Worse Cost
I can't believe in extraordinary unsubstantiated claims just because it would be easier or "bring comfort".
The thing is, as someone raised in a cult I know the danger of believing something that isn't true, and therefore I feel I could never allow myself to become convinced of something purely for comfort. And let me be clear, our cult, which is a known cult, preached mainstream Evangelical beliefs, and I don't think it's a controversial statement that the modus operandi of Evangelicalism does make it a cult, if you look at the BITE model of what actually defines cults.
All that said, my mind is not simply rational but lonely, fearful, wanting belonging and comfort and love and purpose. Perhaps my own "cognitive dissonance" is trying not to give into Nihilism, which is why I love this video from John Green4.
And as part of that, there are times I would really like to allow myself to pretend-believe in something, to seek meaning where there is none, even when I know that.
It would start off as a pretence, and then be something I could convince myself of and internalise as real, and because it was a belief I chose and wanted maybe it would actually bring comfort in exactly the ways that I in particular wanted and needed.
I could (hypothetically, theoretically) try to convince myself of my chosen belief the same way out billionaires have sold themselves as geniuses who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps through hard work, rather than exploiters of massive teams of experts through capitalism, handouts and backing from their wealthy relatives and connections right when they needed to make an investment, and top-notch marketing to rebrand the story, and through surrounding themselves by the yes-men they can afford, they never have to hear uncomfortable criticism of themselves.
This assessment, by the way, was explained most humorously by Adam Connover.
But I know and have seen from the cult, as you would agree from the video, there are dangerous consequences of abdicating one's own responsibility to rationality.
I can't lie to myself, even if it would feel better. Even if getting into such an echo chamber I don't have the immense power to do societal, economic and political damage the way these billionaires do, having harmful beliefs not supported by reality can still damage myself, others I care about in particular and affect society in general as I interact with it.
And the thing with choosing beliefs is if they are not subject to rationality but are based on desire, they become dangerous. Just look at January 6 2021 in the USA, where a belief in a wrongful attempt to seize power actually led to a violent attempt at a coup d'Γ©tat, perceived as a liberation.
This belief was based on three things:
- lies
- lack of honed critical thinking skills (uncoincidentally by a vulnerable, largely evangelical and evangelical-influenced population)
- desire for it to be true causing a selection bias of media consumed
Nowadays, I need proof, and I need to keep critically evaluating and keep myself accountable and willing to adjust my beliefs if new evidence is found.
My beliefs can never be allowed to become my identity to such a degree that rationality and objectivity can't challenge and change them.
Even though certain beliefs, I feel, actually WOULD give me comfort, just like entering into any relationship can be a comforting prospect when one is lonely and even when you suspect it's going to be a bad idea and you know your past partners have tended to be abusive and you haven't figured out why this cycle has perpetuated yet and the red flags are piling up that this one may turn out the same...
Sometimes the heart just cries out for comfort and community, a sense of belonging and a belief in something eternal and greater than ourselves, whether that's love by others, a legacy, or something supernatural.
It's true I've never had the luxury before, to pick which lies I could tell myself. Certainly not consciously.
And now that I have that luxury I know that choosing lies to believe in is like democratically electing a fascist: once that power takes hold of your life, you lose the power to advocate for how much or how little of it you get to have in your life - you've compromised the foundations of your security and it is all gone.
Unless you are to drop skepticism altogether and simply believe what you want to. And as we've explored, choosing that path, the path of appeasing one's narcissism is just as dangerous as choosing to believe lies for comfort.
So if I were to try to properly join a community which is based around having certain religious or religious-like beliefs and identify with that community, I believe that I would end up feeling that I should either be pressured to believe (which I literally can't) or have to leave in order to be truly respectful to that space by being honest about who I am - someone who can't lie to themselves and can't compromise what I find to be true.
Doing that would be beyond my capabilities.
Belief in a Kind Supernatural Force would be Nice
But still, it feels really really nice to see that culture, that belief - or something like belief - in other people, much as I can't let myself indulge in it myself.
I know this may be an inappropriate comparison, but in my mind kinda feels like being the Little Match Girl looking through a window, except instead of seeing food and physical warmth I'm seeing community and comfort and a sense of safety which I know cannot be mine, which I cannot believe in, because it would be disingenuous, and which do not belong to me.
Still.
Still... it sure would be nice.
And maybe ... maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Maybe what I want, what I see is not religion at all, doesn't have to be religion but is culture, community and shared values or a cause, rooted in deep tradition, a shared conviction of what's truly important...
Maybe that can be for me.
Because I want it so badly.
I could believe in that, truly, and I need it.
And as I type this I become aware, for the first time in a long time, that once again I've been ignoring that my hands are cold.
Because I got caught up writing this.
Because I wanted this.
See?
See the trap?
Convincing yourself of something you want and rationalising it in ways that make it ok?
Making truth you've discovered based on facts and evidence be not-quite truth if it's not the comforting truth you want?
That's how easy it is.
1so-identified because of how patient and welcoming of questions the hosts are
2 I admit the metaphor isn't great, as the mind is more akin to a sponge π
3I know there are other experiences of belief and a-belief but I'm sharing my own here
4Admittedly, it doesn't help that I know he's a Christian and therefore does believe in a loving, protective Godfather and a positive eternal life after death which I think helps with overcoming nihilism
Thanks for reading! Subscribe to my free newsletter or follow my RSS feed!