Taking Stock

For a number of reasons, I've been thinking a great deal about what I really want in life, what I really believe (or don't), and how that fits into the life I'm leading. Over the past few years (particularly the past nine months or so) my interest in things scientific, spiritual, philosophical, and religious has been at all time high.

For most of my life, I have had definite leanings away from organized religion and towards a more scientific world view. I do my best to be a good skeptic though (if nothing else, I've learned that I am a skeptic, and always will be), so I've been looking at as many different viewpoints as I can and holding my beliefs up against them. I've realized how little I actually know about the things I think I know. Pondered this, I found that many of my long held beliefs and assumptions were held without proof or evidence, I simply believed them because I always had. Not good.

The most obvious reason for this is environmental. Like most people, I spent most of my time around people who are somewhat like me. Especially as a child, the people you choose to spend time with are going to be those that you agree with in most cases. In that respect, until the age of 24 or so, I had rarely spoken at length with a person of deep religious conviction, or a staunch conservative, or an anarchist, or even a member of a truly repressed minority (I grew up in Maine, after all, and could count the non-Caucasians I've known well on one hand). It was rare for me to put a political or religious view out there and have it disagreed with. Intellectually, I knew that such people as fundamentalists, free market capitalists, and country music fans existed, but I hadn't knowingly come into close contact with them on more than a few occasions.

What changed all of that for me was the Internet. In particular, I found a forum that for a time fostered respectful debate and disagreement, only occasionally getting personal or nasty, about all of these topics and more. It was filled with intelligent and interesting people from all over the country, and even the world, and from all walks of life and ideologies. Interestingly, it was a forum for a then young web comic about movies. The web comic, Theater Hopper, is still going strong and I highly recommend checking it out. The forum, unfortunately, has declined of late, having been over run by spambots and, regrettably, one too many mean spirited arguments. I still hold out hope that it will reclaim it's former glory, but we'll see.

What happened on that forum was not something that I had really experienced before. Someone made a comment that prompted me to state a smirking opinion about people who believe in the Bible as literal truth. In hindsight it was probably a dumb and impolite thing to say, though I don't remember the exact wording now. I didn't think anything of it, assuming that we would all have a little chuckle about "those people" and then move on to other topics. Instead, someone challenged me, politely, to defend my views. What followed was a long and exhaustive debate covering nearly every facet of that particular argument. I know full well that I didn't sway his opinion, or that of any other true believer, but I came away from that debate feeling very good about it.

Being forced to defend me views had pushed me to actually research them, to see if there really was any basis for what I thought I knew. It turned out that I held a number of beliefs for which there was no basis, mostly about people who think differently than myself. Mark, the person who questioned me, will forever have my gratitude for pushing me towards becoming the person I am today. Granted, I'm sure he would have been happier to have shown me the One True Way as he saw it, but I believe we were both happy to discover that you can respect and be courteous towards people you disagree with, even on such a fundamental level.

That little back and forth started years of research and self examination on my part. I've had to let go of some of the things that I've always held as truth, and accept certain things that I'm not altogether happy about. I've learned that wishing something were true doesn't make it so, and that if you have to overlook or dismiss evidence to defend your position, it's probably not a position worth defending. I've also learned that it's OK to say "I was wrong", and to change your views as new evidence comes to light. Doing so doesn't make you "wishy-washy" or weak, quite the opposite. Admitting you were wrong and altering your whole view of the world is harder and more painful by far.

So, what conclusions have I come to? Where do I stand now on the topics raised here, and others? I'm saving that for (possibly many) future posts. I believe it's important to know where a person is coming from first, and how they got to where they're going, before you get into the big questions. Not doing so is how so many of us, especially myself, ended up holding views that don't stand up to scrutiny, and I certainly wouldn't want that.

The truth is always so much more interesting.