My thoughts on Christian fundamentalists (and why they hold to their beliefs)

So this is actually a repost. I originally wrote this small piece on the Atheist Bronies V2.2 group, and it was for several reasons. I took a great interest in understanding belief systems and why people hold onto their beliefs, even if said beliefs are false (although it depends on what you mean by "false"). I had these thoughts for a long time now, and I guess what tipped the snowball was a really insightful conversation I had with scootareader in one of his blogs: here.

This also relates to a one-shot I started writing something like a week ago, about Starlight's beliefs (in season 5) and how it came to that from a psychological perspective. I find this all very, very interesting.

Anyway, I decided to repost my essay here on my blog so more people can see it. I kind of liked what I came up with, so here you go. Keep in mind that I'm not a fundamentalist nor am I arguing for the existence of the supernatural.

The typical strawman version of Christianity, and by that I mean the version most people think of, is protestant fundamentalism, the sort which claims the Bible is to be taken literally true, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, evolution is an evil conspiracy, and so on. It depends on what you mean by literal, but what they mean by literal is that the mythology in the Bible is in the same category as scientific truth.

Scientists will say: "That's ridiculous, they're not scientific truths." While I agree with the scientists on a technical level, I think that's a bad argument for a number of reasons. The biggest problem both the fundamentalists and scientists make is comparing the truths in the Bible to the scientific development we have now.

The people who wrote those ancient stories thousands of years ago—especially Genesis, which comprises very old stories, possibly tens of thousands of years old—those people were in no plausible way, shape, or form scientists. We didn't have science till a few hundred years ago. Sure, you can trace it back to the Greek philosophers (barely), but science as we know it started with people like Newton. So this idea that religious truths are scientific truths is just false, plain and simple, and we shouldn't be debating it.

Modern people make the mistake in assuming we all think like scientists. We don't. Heck, most scientists don't think like scientists, and if you aren't scientifically trained you don't think like a scientist at all, no matter how many videos on Youtube you've watched. One of the things that characterizes this is confirmation bias. For example, you have a theory, and so you start looking for evidence to support your theory. A scientist is supposed to disprove themselves in the narrow domain they actually have to be a scientist.

This is all to say that the framework which serves for modern science (i.e. empirical observation) can't go further back than 500-1,000 years. Take Aristotle as another example. When he was writing down his knowledge of the world it never occurred to him that he should actually go out and explore the world to see if what he was saying about it was correct. Not just that, but to bring ten different people and have each of them look at the same thing independently, compare the records, and extract out what was common. That may be somewhat obvious to us, but back then it wasn't apparent to them in the slightest, because people thousands of years ago, in an age where science didn't exist, definitely didn't think like scientists. Not even close. So it's a false equivalence to compare religion to modern science.

That brings us to the fundamentalists, who claim the Bible is scientific truth. And, you know, it's easy to make fun of that. But I don't think it's wise to make fun of it.

I think there's a reason people defend their beliefs, and it's not because they're stupid. Back when people believed that the Earth was flat and that God/the gods resided up the sky—those people weren't stupid, and maybe not even wholly ignorant. Because in a time when people couldn't even comprehend science, even in a cursory manner, then what else could they do? What they did was act out their mythology and stories because their psychology hadn't developed further than that. Sacrifices were burnt, the smoke would rise, and God would get a whiff of its quality to reward the humans who made the sacrifice—that was the belief. You can laugh about that and call it superstitious drivel, but it's really not. It's beautiful and expressive and accurate. Before the invention of electrical lights or even oil-torches, the closest thing humans could get to the confrontation of the unknown was the night sky, because you'd look up and be filled with awe and fear simultaneously. And to make the presupposition that God resides in the infinite and you're having an experience with the infinite isn't primitive or stupid. It's an intelligent and creative hypothesis, and is reflective of the nature of human experience.

That's the key thing: sacrifice. Do you know how much blood was shed before we realized that we could sacrifice abstractly? Really, our reasoning was: "God loves sacrifices, so here they are." We went through a lot of evolution, most of it psychological evolution, before it ever crossed our minds that we can sacrifice in the abstract. And back then, when people made sacrifices, they weren't being stupid or primitive. The motivation that drives the worst human atrocities is an inevitable consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious person to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a prosperous and good life. If you don't make any sacrifices, you can't get an education, you can't live in a shelter, you can't find meaning. Nothing.

One thing that's particularly troublesome is the reasoning behind our beliefs. The reason people may have fundamentalist beliefs is the dichotomy between the infinite and the finite. According to Christian mythology God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. So, he's infinite... all-powerful and infinite in every conceivable way: he knows literally everything, and literally nothing is out of his reach. Well, what does an infinite being lack? That would be limitations, vulnerabilities—and vulnerabilities is a precondition for being, for our existence. I mean, if you're infinite then there's no story, because a story is a linear string of time aggregated with events of objective reality, creating a correlation: the more time there is, the more things there are that happen or exist in the full picture. But that's not possible if you know everything and are omnipotent. So there's no history or notion of time if you're infinite, and I think you need beliefs to frame your lenses because we just don't know everything. A person who's convinced their beliefs encompass everything are totalitarian dictators. If you don't have beliefs—a belief in equality, for example—then you're directionless. Beliefs fill in the gaps.

For example, this is an idea I got from Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and Jordan Peterson—if you were alive in Nazi Germany in the 30's, there's an overwhelming probability you'd be a nazi. Or if you were born under the Soviet Union there's an overwhelming probability you'd be a gulag guard. It's easy to deny that because we have historical hindsight, but if you can't accept your capacity for evil then you sure as hell can't boast about your capacity for good. Jung said that our shadows reach down to the bottom of hell (metaphorically speaking, of course), meaning that, just like in the poem of Dante's Inferno, where the deeper down you go the more twisted and depraved things become, with the Devil as the axiomatic figure at the bottom—it means that we all have a capacity for the most atrocious things imaginable somewhere in the back of our minds, and the only way to be a moral person is to look down your shadow. After all, morality comes from you having teeth but choosing not to use them. Being harmless doesn't make you moral, it just makes you harmless. I think people might have beliefs to guide them, in a sense.

You'd think that, given the evidence throughout history, people can be enlightened. But if enlightenment is the self-conscious acceptance for our capacity for evil as a means to better the world, then you know why it's in such short supply, because accepting the prospect that you have an infinite capacity for evil is horrible. Stalin believed life was evil and that he could only do no wrong, look how that turned out.

It's no wonder fundamentalists will defend their beliefs. If you strip away your beliefs then you strip away your defense against the depredations of the infinite. If you're caught up in defending your beliefs you'll have no problem killing people according to that rationalization, which explains the motivations behind the terrible things religion has brought on about the world, predicated on ideology.

As far as I see it, it's a lose-lose situation. Possibly the way out is by reading Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, because I think those guys explain how best to bear your suffering and beliefs (or lack thereof).