That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins’ latest, “this book changed the way I see things!” It’s a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that “atheism is just another religion”, but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether “religion” might be just the word for that mental process.
What’s strange about converting from one idea to another by reading a book? A book can contain a lot of information. Sometimes it doesn’t even take very much to change one’s mind. Suppose a person believes that the continents can’t be shifting, because there’s no room for them to move around on a solid sphere. Then they read about subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, and see a diagram of plate movement around the world, and think “Oh, I guess it can happen that way, how silly of me not to have thought of that.”
I haven’t found any religious text convincing, because they tend to be heavy on constructing a thematic message and providing social motivation to believe, light on evidence, but for a lot of people that’s a normal way to become convinced of things (indeed, I recently finished reading a book where the author discussed how, among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present or how probable your claim was.)
among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present
I suspect this was also true of the tribe I went to high-school with.
What’s strange about converting from one idea to another by reading a book? A book can contain a lot of information. Sometimes it doesn’t even take very much to change one’s mind. Suppose a person believes that the continents can’t be shifting, because there’s no room for them to move around on a solid sphere. Then they read about subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, and see a diagram of plate movement around the world, and think “Oh, I guess it can happen that way, how silly of me not to have thought of that.”
I haven’t found any religious text convincing, because they tend to be heavy on constructing a thematic message and providing social motivation to believe, light on evidence, but for a lot of people that’s a normal way to become convinced of things (indeed, I recently finished reading a book where the author discussed how, among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present or how probable your claim was.)
I suspect this was also true of the tribe I went to high-school with.