LifeOnaPlate wrote:Smarter folk than me still believe. Faith is a funny thing. ;)
Oftentimes the smarter one is, the better equipped one is to invent justifications and excuses for what one believes, when it runs into snags. The real key here is to be able to recognize when one is justifying error and making excuses for one's belief, and force oneself to
stop doing that.In a book I recently read, and which I enjoyed so much that I'm reading it again,
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the author invented a historical figure named Diax, who had chased a bunch of numerologists out of the temple of Orithena with a gardener's rake, while yelling out something to the effect that one should not believe something because one wishes it to be true. In the history/mythology of this book's world, Diax laid the foundation for rigorous critical thinking and analysis which allowed such sciences as mathematics and physics to take off and prosper.
Thousands of years later, the monks who live in the monasteries of math/science/philosophy, who are at the center of this book's plot, often bring up what they call "Diax's rake", which is the rigorous examination of one's beliefs and arguments and weeding out of those things believed not on evidence or sufficient logic, but because they support what one wishes to be true. They impose it upon themselves and each other in their debates and discussions, and identify and weed out ideas that "wouldn't survive Diax's Rake."
Loap, will your ideas survive Diax's Rake?
The tipping point for me was when I was reading about the Book of Abraham and Joseph Smith's rampant, industrial-scale polygamy, and more importantly, the FARMS and other LDS excuses and justifications, and attacks, that sought to reconcile these things with the LDS church's truth claims, and realized that they won't survive the Rake.
I didn't know it as Diax's Rake at the time, and of course I live on Earth and not the world of Arbre, but find, looking back, that "Diax's Rake" is an extremely useful metaphor for the kinds of realizations and thoughts that I had at that tipping point in my life, when I realized that I had been making excuses, justifications, and fabricating ways of propping up my faith and supporting my beliefs in the teeth of contrary evidence. And so I stopped doing that. And you know what? I'm OK. My head didn't explode, my world didn't cave in, and the collapse of my faith in the truth claims of the LDS church, in the larger context of this world, in fact is natural, positive, and not that big a deal. It only
seems like a big deal while you're still in that world.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen