There is a definite reason why you would spend so much time building your great wall here on CAF. I would not spend so much time on a site refuting the existence of unicorns. It is apparent that you are still searching and it is as obvious as the writing in everyone of your posts. You built your wall with the smallest peep hole allowing you to still peer for a glimmer of hope. Only you know where that peep hole is so to us it seems that your wall is impermeable and sound. But it is through the smallest of openings that dams have broken and lives have changed.
Well, everybody says I’m dogmatic that it can’t happen, but here I am and I’m listening and reading. I’m not persuaded, and to be quite honest, you’re right, CAF is useful that way, but not
quite in the way you think. I can’t speak for other atheists, but I like to test my ideas here – I liked to test my religious ideas on other streams of Christianity, other religions and unbelievers… iron sharpens iron and all that, and now as an unbeliever, I do get thoughtful challenges to my beliefs and understanding that are valuable to me.
And it could be disruptive, life-changing I suppose. I don’t rule anything out.
But really, most of the CAF discussions just serve to underscore for me how untenable all this is. Not all of them, of course – there are sharp, articulate minds here, and Catholics who are able to “step out of their worldview” temporarily to consider arguments from another perspective, which is a commitment I want to make in such discussions and appreciate from others as the chief qualification for really edifying conversations. But on the main, the effect is largely a galvanizing one for me. The thoughtful atheists here are much more persuasive and compelling. Not because they are any more articulate or brainy, but rather, I think, because they are working form a more coherent, robust model of reality. Atheism isn’t that model, but better models, I’ve found, tend to produce religious unbelief.
Your religion is posted as atheist all while admitting that most who claim to be are agnostic. You seem very intelligent, well read and very articulate. But a man of many words does not necessarily make a man of truth. Many scholars disagree with each other and many with high degrees lead droves of people to their demise. Polarization takes place in whatever it is that we seek. Once you started convincing yourself that we live in a Godless universe you started to polarize yourself to those who could back up your doubts. Even though you admit to meeting with educated Catholics and Protestants your doubts prevailed to where you heard their voices but no longer listened to their message.
Thank you for the kind compliments, there. I appreciate that, sincerely. I’m a college dropout, if you’re interested to know – went to work for Apple in my junior year of college and never looked back. My credentials are all just professional/commercial performance. I point that out because I’m no “ivory towery academic” – I’m a techno-geek that feeds his family through the home runs and strikeouts of venture-back startups. That’s pretty far from the august halls of the academy – it’s a rough, real world I live in, professionally.
You do raise a good point, though about polarization and confirmation bias. But that’s one of the reasons I’m here. Really, a major error of my life was self-insulation and living in an evangelical echo-chamber for the early parts of my life. I was really just ingorant, unaware of the vast expanses of Christendom and beyond that lay beyond my bubble. Catholic friends from college introduce me to the ECF, and that was the thread that lead to “waking up” to the wider, orthodox, historic streams of faith and thought that both Rome and EOC represent.
I simply never allowed myself to consider unbelief. My whole world was organized around it. It
had to be true in the deepest emotional and social ways. But in the course of being out in the world working, travelling internationally a lot for my job, and just working in the tech industry, which is
extremely diverse, culturally and intellectually, I got less and less clueless, more informed about the big ideas and different values and frameworks out there.
I should have hung out here long before I did. And I should have interacted with science, and materialist philosophy beyond that, and critical unbelief long before I did. I had many Buddhist friends in my years in the business, and that was a good way to get exposed to the Tao, something I don’t embrace, but am the better for understanding.
But here I am. I’m not living in an echo chamber of unbelief.
Most of my posting time goes to discussions with believers, or others who can challenge and stress-test my beliefs and worldview. Don’t take this in an accusatory way, but do you make such efforts to put your beliefs up to such strenuous, critical testing, holding forth on atheist blogs or other places where you are Daniel in the Lion’s Den, so to speak? Good on ya if so, but I suspect that’s pretty uncommon for most believers, and most believers
here.
There may be more I can and should to to “always test” my ideas and beliefs, but I think if you followed me around, you’d see someone who is committed to seeing if his ideas and arguments can acquit themselves in the face of determined and skilled opposition.
-TS
(con’t)
Faith in the pedantic sense that it is “belief without evidence”, but not faith in that is non-optional, necessary. See my persistent raising of the “cigarette lighter test” for any who suppose reality isn’t real. An open flame under the hand shows quite vividly that even the most staunch denier of the reality of reality refutes his own claims when the flame hits his palm.
And that often cures them of their silliness.