About faith

Faith and matters Spiritual play a major role in my life. I consider myself neither religious, nor anti-religious. Rather, religion is just the kind of mass-coordinated movement of people that follow in the wake of some great spiritual teacher (whether Jesus, the Buddha, or other) or tradition of teaching.

I despair of much of what we see in the behaviour of the religious today. There is a trouble that, since religions are made out of people, and people are generally vulnerable to cult-like thinking, that even the most pure religious movements will have a cult-like following, and others will have a worse one. On the other hand, simply trying to discard religion doesn't work as a fix for this. People prone to following cult-like movements will just find other cult-like movements to give their life meaning. Try to be a rational atheist? Likely you'll just end up in 'rational atheist' echo chambers on social media, proud of your 'rational atheism', all enthusiastically confirming each others beliefs. Try to be a 'pure Bible believing Christian', you'll need to try hard to avoid falling into a 'Christianity proven by science' echo chamber on social media, or something like that.

The core of critical thinking, without which any lineage of teaching will degenerate into superstition, is that you must actively challenge your own prized positions in order to 'crash test' your beliefs and to weed out the nonsensical 'spiritual garbage' that will accumulate in a mind which doesn't carefully cultivate its 'inner garden'. And this attitude of critical thinking should be cultivated no matter what side of the spiritual divide you reside on, whether Christian, atheist, Buddhist, or other. Encouraging such critical thinking is important to me. The Biblical lesson many will mindlessly quote as 'authority' to ignore critical thinking, such as:

should instead be read as saying 'do not fall into the trap of believing yourself correct'. You should challenge your own ideas, you should challenge what you read in scripture, you should challenge your interpretations, you should challenge those of others, you should challenge those who write off scripture as 'historical garbage'. But you can never prove yourself totally correct, and you should never presume to. You can never presume to know more than a tiny fraction of the knowledge available to you, and that 'knowledge available to you' is a tiny fraction of the 'knowledge out there'. To think that you know more than a tiny morsel is important. This is important because to think this way, while arguably the philosophically correct mindset, runs counter to our natural tendencies. We want to be right, so we tend to defend our position and to competitively try to avoid being wrong. The good scientist desperately wants to be wrong, but somehow can't find the 'smoking gun' evidence that he's wrong. That's what separates science from pseudoscience. It is the same with scripture and Faith. If I can be proven wrong, I want to be proven wrong. When I find myself proven wrong, I 'repent of my old views', and change. Ultimately, just like the scientific mindset is maximally pessimistic subject to logic and reason, so we should be maximally pessimistic as to how good we are, or how important we are. This is necessary as a counterbalance to our natural human tendencies to 'big ourselves up' and 'please ourselves' and so on. When we fall into the trap of prioritising our own happiness over the welfare of others, we fall into the mire of selfishness, those around us suffer, some then fall into their mires of selfishness, and eventually we all suffer and lose out as a result. Faith proper, whether Christian, Buddhist, Humanist, or whatever, is best understood as a bulwark against the worst of our evolutionary heritage from running amok and ruining the place. In the world of 2026 when I am writing this, that 'evolutionary heritage running amok' is winning the battle.