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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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The Church of Christ has been good for me. It has its foibles, but it's decentralized so there's no way to skinsuit it from the top. Individual churches may not be immune to lady ministers and Rainbow politics, but they are generally quite resistant to them.

As for belief, it seems to me that the best approach for most atheists moving in this direction starts with interrogating what human beliefs are and how they actually work. The popular narrative is that beliefs are forced by evidence through a deterministic process; once people have adopted this belief, they note that contrary beliefs are not being forced by the subsequent evidence they encounter, and so conclude that the evidence for those contrary beliefs must not be very strong, and so can be safely discarded. This creates a system of self-reinforcing circular logic that is nearly impervious to contradiction so long as it is not examined too closely.

If you examine the process by which beliefs are formed and modified, though, you will clearly see that this narrative is very clearly false. Beliefs are not forced by evidence through a deterministic process, but rather very clearly chosen through an act of will. We reason from axioms, and axioms are necessarily chosen pre-rationally.

It seems to me that people who find genuine belief in God impossible are trying to believe in God in defiance of their own axioms, which is never going to work well. The solution is to confront the axioms themselves in particular and the nature of axioms generally, and to internalize that the consensus Rationalist Materialist narrative is not nearly as seamless as it presents itself. This ought, it seems to me, free them up to allow doubt to work for their faith rather than only against it.