It was akrasia, Dostoyevsky, and the sacrament of confession that turned me into a rationalist. Seriously.
I became very religious as a teenager (for social reasons, as I’d later realize), and drifted more and more traditional and conservative (since I could see that liberal Christianity is generally logically incoherent). This drew me into theology (thus philosophy), so that I’d been exposed in college to all the arguments I needed to reject Christianity; I just refused to apply them, generally taking them one at a time and playing One Argument Against an Army.
What changed in grad school had to do with the internalization of the virtue of honesty. Because I had to confess my sins frequently, I became more and more aware of my rationalizations and self-deception (in areas of discipline and akrasia, not of course rationality). I took to heart what Dostoyevsky wrote in “The Brothers Karamazov”:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.
Before long, though, the practice of listening for the signs of self-deception and rationalization had an unexpected consequence: my doubts of the faith, which I’d battled as a sin again and again, were growing worse as I recognized the bad arguments I was letting myself be satisfied with. It finally came to the point of recognizing that I was striving to rid myself of doubt when I thought I was striving to investigate it.
From there, it was a comparatively short leap to atheism and to a more consequentialist and physicalist reevaluation of my interpretation of the world. Nietzsche helped greatly, which is why it saddens me when he’s dismissed for the wrong reasons (as invariably happens with people who’ve only heard of him, or only read short bits). But enough about that.
(I later got hooked on OB because the early posts rang very true to what I’d gone through, though I’d never expressed it as clearly as what I saw there.)
My point is that my birth as a rationalist isn’t identical with my fall from religion; it merely caused it as a side effect. My real rationalist beginning was learning to doubt beliefs that felt like they needed no argument, because I’d realized that feelings of certainty arise for reasons besides entanglement with truth.
It was akrasia, Dostoyevsky, and the sacrament of confession that turned me into a rationalist. Seriously.
I became very religious as a teenager (for social reasons, as I’d later realize), and drifted more and more traditional and conservative (since I could see that liberal Christianity is generally logically incoherent). This drew me into theology (thus philosophy), so that I’d been exposed in college to all the arguments I needed to reject Christianity; I just refused to apply them, generally taking them one at a time and playing One Argument Against an Army.
What changed in grad school had to do with the internalization of the virtue of honesty. Because I had to confess my sins frequently, I became more and more aware of my rationalizations and self-deception (in areas of discipline and akrasia, not of course rationality). I took to heart what Dostoyevsky wrote in “The Brothers Karamazov”:
Before long, though, the practice of listening for the signs of self-deception and rationalization had an unexpected consequence: my doubts of the faith, which I’d battled as a sin again and again, were growing worse as I recognized the bad arguments I was letting myself be satisfied with. It finally came to the point of recognizing that I was striving to rid myself of doubt when I thought I was striving to investigate it.
From there, it was a comparatively short leap to atheism and to a more consequentialist and physicalist reevaluation of my interpretation of the world. Nietzsche helped greatly, which is why it saddens me when he’s dismissed for the wrong reasons (as invariably happens with people who’ve only heard of him, or only read short bits). But enough about that.
(I later got hooked on OB because the early posts rang very true to what I’d gone through, though I’d never expressed it as clearly as what I saw there.)
My point is that my birth as a rationalist isn’t identical with my fall from religion; it merely caused it as a side effect. My real rationalist beginning was learning to doubt beliefs that felt like they needed no argument, because I’d realized that feelings of certainty arise for reasons besides entanglement with truth.