Doubt

A key means of undoing brainwashing and other mental conditioning, it is to promote doubts. That is, to give some sort of affirmation to those who are in doubt of their fundamentalist dogma. I'm looking for materials that are powerful, and yet not brutally so.

As much as I admire your ambition in this project, I think ultimately you will be preaching to the choir.

I just came back from a Bar Mitvah of a family friend. Although I ddn't understand the Hebrew, I did understand the impressive mix and power of what I saw during that hour of love for family, tradition going back thousands of years, community, moral strength, and intellect of the rabbi, cantor, and the 13 year old. That's what you are up against.

In this thread, there I see there are a few intellectual rabbit trails that in my opinion will go no where. For example, I wouldn't spend much time on Biblical contradictions as religion is essentially a zone of contradictory thought that believers relish and embrace. For example, most believers I suspect will shrug their shoulders should I point out that according to Ezra 2:15, 454 of Adin’s offspring returned from Babylon; according to Nehemiah 7:20, 655 of Adin’s children returned from Babylon or that Ahaziah began to reign in the 12th year of Joram, according to 2 Kings 8:28 and in the 11th year of Joram, according to 2 Kings 9:29. The same is true when I highlight the pre-Darwinian and pre-Copernican language of Genesis. All of that is irrelevant, as semantical errors to the believers do not equate to spiritual falsehoods. They paradoxically may add to the Bible's credability as they put its language into a realm outside of the transient and the mundane-- history, geography, empercisim, and the like. Religion is at its core a paradox. “Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit—the paradoxical sadness of ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief’ and the paradoxical triumph of Tertullian’s ‘Credo quia impossibile’ (I believe because it is impossible.),” Whittaker Chambers wrote in an essay on Reinhold Niebuhr. “Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son.

“Why do you weep,’ asked a friend, ‘since it cannot help?
Said Solon: “That is why I weep—because it cannot help.”

If you fight this battle in the realm of logic and science, you will always win-- but it will be a Pyrrhic victory because you are fighting phantoms. This isn't where the real battle is and perhaps never was. The same is true when you turn a spot light on religious hypocrisy or scientific obsurantism . This isn't where the battle should be fought in my view, for the simple fact that some believers are not hypocritical and are scientific whereas some doubters are hypocritical and are not scientific. In fact, I question your premise: that the cultivation of doubt is somehow an antidote to faith as if to say that faith and doubt cannot co-exist. They not only can co-exist but they can reinforce each other, as the recent letters of Mother Thereas attest.

The transition to religious skepticism and the transition to atheism are too very different roads. The road most traveled are what you interlocutors have already for the msot part suggested-- non-convincing (at least to me) discussions about the origin and credability fo the Bible or the history of Christianity. The road least traveled would probably require a solid course in classic Aristotelian logic and perhaps something from writers such Bertrand Russell.

http://www.solstice.us/russell/value_scepticism.html

http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

But the deeper question is why do people make the jump either one way to another-- from faithlessness to faith, from faith to faith, or from faith to faithlessness? It rarely has much to do with logic or argument although logic and argument can inform the desire to take a new intellectual journey. I believe it has more to do with personal experimentation. You experience one history and that leads to misery so you root around for another opportunity to reinvent yourself in kind of a self-administered therapy. If that reinvention works for you-- if it brings pleasure and bliss-- you stick with it. If it doesn't, you discard it and you try something else. It is a life journey that is both psychological and pragmatic and which has little to do with reasonality or skepticism as such.

Those skeptics who are not yet atheists are still compartmentalizing.

However, in a sense, doctrinal investigation of any kind requires a floor of doubt, whether you are digging into the Atharva Veda or the Gospel According to Luke. It is all a process of questioning, analysis, and discovery. You may argue that the premises are false, but skeptical rigor can still be present.

Whereas you view skepticism as basically the culmination of skepticism, I view it more as a milestone in one's intellectual pilgramage, and for some people, a sophomoric milestone-- cheap jabs at the "xtian myth", say. Russell's essay on why he isn't a Christian is a sophisticated example of this-- interesting to read but persuasive only to his atheistic partisans.

The other essay I posted from him is also flawed. Take, for example, Russell's credo of skepticism: “The skepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain; (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend judgment.” The rarest kind of skepticism is skepticism that turns on iself-- scientists that are skeptical of science, atheists that are skeptical of atheism, religionists who are skeptical of religion. Let's apply this meta-skepticism, if you will, to Russell's statement. First, I’m not impressed with appeals to authority and the condescending phrase “ordinary people” juxtaposed to “experts.” I’m a lot less trusting in experts than Russell is. I won’t say that experts are always wrong, but I will say that they can be wrong, especially when they are dealing with life and death issues such as birth and terminal sickness—or really any ethical issue. Secondly, on what grounds do we need to rely on either a consensus of opinion or even any opinion to establish any kind of truth? Thirdly, why exactly would we “do well to suspend judgment” in the absence of certitude? The entire statement, actually, is replete with fuzziness to make it worthless as a guide. But Lord Russell’s broad point is valid-- that we must test what we know in the fires of doubt, constantly doubting what we read, hear, and see.

However, what I also see are skeptics that make doubt an end in itself-- always asking questions or attacking but positing no answers or even hynotheses or defending. I'm not sure I'm willing to embrace this kind intellectual nihilism, what amounts to a philosophical shrug of one's shoulders. At some point, I believe, doubt must resolve into knowledge-- justified true belief.

Thinking is hard work, especially when you think for yourself, and for you it may indeed resolve itself into atheism. But, as T.S. Eliot wrote, we may return to where we started-- what we find through years of study might indeed be what we lisped as children in Sunday school, but it must be up to us to start that exploration.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.