Out of the Looking Glass
I’ve been exchanging comments on one of my old posts with Baal Habos, who has a two part post on the same topic (the question being why most people maintain their beliefs while others do not), and he posed the following question/comment.
What really is driving me nuts, is understanding the switch from belief to non-belief. Why do some [who] get exposed to science & history accept the truth [while] others resort to all sorts of apologetica.
And he postulates the following:
If you dropped someone from a different environment who was never exposed to religion or philosophic thoughts. Exposing them to fair debate, don't you think they would all land on the secular side?
(I’ll focus on this second comment in a future post.)
One interesting, if peripheral, aspect of these comments is that they reflect a phase that most of us skeptics seem to go though sooner or later. There is a very tangible change which happens some time after you have left religion and have had a chance to reacclimate to the world. At some point, you look back at the belief system which you left behind and feel a sense of shock at what you see.
This may really be the point of no return. Up until then, there is a sort of built in defensiveness in your thinking. You have all of your reasons – logical and moral, all worked out in your mind - as if you have to justify your choice to leave the Orthodox world. But at that moment, you suddenly grasp that the shoe belongs firmly on the other foot. You have the powerful feeling of seeing, for the first time, your old beliefs on equal footing with the claims of the other religious groups.
And, just as suddenly, your need to justify your ideas evaporates. “Am I really concerned about explaining why I don’t believe in this outrageous mythology?” “Am I really worried about proving that I’m still moral?” You feel, for the first time, that it would be just as absurd to have to justify why you are not a Mormon or Scientologies.
All of us skeptics are keenly aware of the Orthodox notion that we leave religion because of our personal weakness – our lusts, our laziness, our misguided thinking. But once we reach this point, that idea is simply laughable. Whatever the causes are for our lost faith, we haven’t been blinded – on the contrary, we’ve been given sight.
With this turning point comes the frustration that Baal Habos is voicing. Up until then, Orthodox thinking is such a strong part of your own perspective that you have an intuitive grasp of why the everyone believes. But once you cross this line, and the Orthodox haze retreats farther and farther into the past, it becomes more and more difficult to understand.
What really is driving me nuts, is understanding the switch from belief to non-belief. Why do some [who] get exposed to science & history accept the truth [while] others resort to all sorts of apologetica.
And he postulates the following:
If you dropped someone from a different environment who was never exposed to religion or philosophic thoughts. Exposing them to fair debate, don't you think they would all land on the secular side?
(I’ll focus on this second comment in a future post.)
One interesting, if peripheral, aspect of these comments is that they reflect a phase that most of us skeptics seem to go though sooner or later. There is a very tangible change which happens some time after you have left religion and have had a chance to reacclimate to the world. At some point, you look back at the belief system which you left behind and feel a sense of shock at what you see.
This may really be the point of no return. Up until then, there is a sort of built in defensiveness in your thinking. You have all of your reasons – logical and moral, all worked out in your mind - as if you have to justify your choice to leave the Orthodox world. But at that moment, you suddenly grasp that the shoe belongs firmly on the other foot. You have the powerful feeling of seeing, for the first time, your old beliefs on equal footing with the claims of the other religious groups.
And, just as suddenly, your need to justify your ideas evaporates. “Am I really concerned about explaining why I don’t believe in this outrageous mythology?” “Am I really worried about proving that I’m still moral?” You feel, for the first time, that it would be just as absurd to have to justify why you are not a Mormon or Scientologies.
All of us skeptics are keenly aware of the Orthodox notion that we leave religion because of our personal weakness – our lusts, our laziness, our misguided thinking. But once we reach this point, that idea is simply laughable. Whatever the causes are for our lost faith, we haven’t been blinded – on the contrary, we’ve been given sight.
With this turning point comes the frustration that Baal Habos is voicing. Up until then, Orthodox thinking is such a strong part of your own perspective that you have an intuitive grasp of why the everyone believes. But once you cross this line, and the Orthodox haze retreats farther and farther into the past, it becomes more and more difficult to understand.
posted by dbs at 8:32 PM
22 Comments:
Good post! It really is impossible to see how smart, informed people continue to believe once you've crossed that threshold.
>>All of us skeptics are keenly aware of the Orthodox notion that we leave religion because of our personal weakness – our lusts, our laziness, our misguided thinking. But once we reach this point, that idea is simply laughable.
Yes, it's silly to suggest that people become kofrim because of lusts, laziness and misguided thinking. But there seems to be some truth to it in the sense that *given* a person's realization that the Torah is manmade, it takes a lot more to actually take the step from thought (i.e. a heretical worldview) to action (i.e. leaving Orthodoxy). Wouldn't you agree that taking the step of leaving Orthodoxy can be precipitated by not wanting to be tied down to the stringencies of Orthodox life, sex, etc.?
DBS, almost but not quite.
Don't forget, I still live the Frum life, so my viewpoint is still somewhat from the inside. I can understand my friends who have not gone through the skeptic debate because I was just like them. What I don't understand is those who have gone through the debate. It is those people who are exposed to the truth, but don't grasp it or don't internalize it, it is those who I have difficulty understanding.
>Wouldn't you agree that taking the step of leaving Orthodoxy can be precipitated by not wanting to be tied down to the stringencies of Orthodox life, sex, etc.?
Sure, it's even likely! But it doesn't mean that the difficulty of living the OJ is what caused the change of belief.
JA,
Thanks, I don't think that it's impossible to understand, but it takes a better apreciation of the emotional forces involved.
Bruce,
I actually don't think that it matters why people get started down that road. I think that getting yourself out of orthodoxy is very challenging, and anything that gives you some impetus is good. In any case, the idea that people stay because they are being intellectualy honest or morally stringent is nonesense.
bh,
Yes I know you're still living the life, rachmanah l'zlan.
Sure, it's easier to understand people who have no intellectual curiosity. My main point is just that at some point your perspective changes radically and what was once a reasonable theory of the universe suddenly looks ridiculous.
Why Now?
One of the issues that has me puzzled is why the phenomenon of the frum skeptic has appeared now when it could have just as easily shown up 25 or 30 years ago (or even 50 years ago). The same basic forces of reason based science versus faith based religion were there.
My best answer is there's more religion and more science and that's forced a showdown.
>My best answer is there's more religion and more science and that's forced a showdown.
Maybe because there's more communication to faciliatate skepticism - The Internet.
"At some point, you look back at the belief system which you left behind and feel a sense of shock at what you see."
This eventually happens to skeptics even if they hadn't had a chance to leave religion and "reacclimate to the world." It's an strange feeling. Eerie, in a sense.
Of course, there are many intelligent, bright people who believe in all kinds of ridiculous notions. Intelligence makes for more convincing apologetics. I don't really have a problem understanding that; most of us are products of a particular culture, and whatever baseline assumptions are taken for granted in that culture are extremely difficult to shake, no matter what knowledge you're exposed to. You can see examples of this all throughout history.
What I do find surprising, though, is the (notable) existence of well-educated and extremely bright people who grew up secular and gravitated towards religion later in life -- sometimes even to extreme forms of religion. When pressed, they are usually at a loss to explain their beliefs in a rational fashion. It's an interesting phenomenon.
Al,
I would agree with bh's statement. Also, the internet and blogging offers an easily accesable and potentially anonoumous forum to discuss these ideas.
I also think that you have a point - there is much more science out there. (I believe that there is actually less religion, but it is very visible.)
baal devarim,
I agree that our culture and background is a much better predictor of our outlooks than our intelligence.
I also think that people do (on rare occasions) adopt religous beliefs for reasons which are primarily emotional rather than intellectual. For whatever reason, religion works better for them.
There is also a huge population who gravitate from whatever their starting point is to some type of humanistic spirituality - not quite as far fetched as believing bible stories, but also an interesting phenomenon.
BHB,
>>But it doesn't mean that the difficulty of living the OJ is what caused the change of belief.
Exactly.
Al,
>>One of the issues that has me puzzled is why the phenomenon of the frum skeptic has appeared now when it could have just as easily shown up 25 or 30 years ago (or even 50 years ago).
If there is a "new" phenomenon of frum skeptics then I would agree with the others that it's largely because of the internet/blogs.
But IS there really a frum skeptic phenomenon? Food for thought: there are hundreds of thousands of frum Jews in the U.S. How do we know that more than a couple of dozen are skeptics? How many skeptic bloggers and skeptic commenters are there? Please prove me wrong, but it's possible that we are more alone than we think...
Caped Crusader:
Actually I made the very same point on BHB's post "Fundamentally speaking"
I would define the number of frum skeptics as rising but still quite small in actual percentage but the frum skeptic phenomenon as growing in importance mainly through blogging and as part of the larger "Return to Rationality" as evidenced by the Dawkins , Dennett, Harris and Hitchens books.
Also interesting is that we are seeing a wider and more representative population then one would expect. The most common example of a yeshiva graduate who has gone to college, entered the working world and is now in his mid 30s to early 40s is now joined by women (more than I would have guessed), chasisdim (again Lubavitchers were a suprise to me) and olim. I haven't seen anyone professing to be a Kolel person (or a Rosh Kolel/Yeshivah) yet.
Al, Olim?
Anyhow, I think, guessing on the new arrivals, is that moset are in their 20's.
It might be safe to say, that most if that most of those who are older, had they been skeptic, would have already arrived in the blog world by now.
But, of course, there might be exceptions, such as I. I turned skeptical around 10 years ago, through the library. It's the Internet blogs that confirmed it for me around two.
But you're both right, there's not many around, but have you seen TFSG, The Frum skeptic group? There are 500 signed up.
BHB
OK re-reading that sentence, Olim seems slightly out of place. I meant one blog of a recently arrived oleh who is a frum skeptic and it struck me as strange.
BHB,
>>But you're both right, there's not many around, but have you seen TFSG, The Frum skeptic group? There are 500 signed up.
500 signed up...and that's after four years or so. And all the frum skeptic bloggers and commenters are probably included in that total. Also, its quite possible that many of those signed up just signed up out of curiosity to see what the buzz was about.
Bruce
Although the population of frum skeptics may be small, it’s not as tiny as that reflected in the Frum skeptic group or other blogoshere indicators. One personal data point I have is knowing a group of Chabad young adults who are no longer religious. Some have come out of the closet and some haven’t. They reside mostly in Los Angeles (with a few Brooklyn additions) and have all become skeptics in their teens or early twenties. I would say that I have met at least 10 - 20 kids out of a small (100’s) Lubovitch community. They wouldn’t blog, but interestingly have had an active clandestine community on MySpace which also includes frum kids. The content is less intellectual and more about music/flirting/photographs and other fun activities.
>500 signed up...and that's after four years or so. And all the frum skeptic bloggers and commenters are probably included in that total. Also, its quite possible that many of those signed up just signed up out of curiosity to see what the buzz was about.
Absolutely right. And even more, many of the 500 are not"frum" in any sense of the word, not even in public. Rather, they are formerly frum. Ay,there might be thousands of those.
Nothing personal DBS, but one of my main interests is in the difficulties of a non believer living in the frum world.
Baal, Al & bruce,
I think that the number is small, but it is a puzzling demographic question. The orthodox community has remaind a reletively constant percent of the jewish community for the past 40 years, despite the much higher birth rate of the orthodox sector and high intermarrige rate of the non-orthodox. So, apparently, there are plenty of people leaving. (Though some of this is accounted for by immegration and undercounting.)
I think that it is true that most people who leave just drop out or drift away in their teens and twenties and don't bother blogging about it.
On the other hand, you would still expect more activity in the skeptical blogging world, which really is tiny. There are about 1.5 million frum jews. If 2% leave every five years, that would be about 30k people. If you count how many people in the entire skeptical blog world are actually in the process of leaving, it can't be more than a few hundred (and it seems like much fewer).
But if the orthodox population is really growing at a rate of 6% per year (as it is in Israel), then in order to maintain it's ratio to the overall jewish population, at least 4% per year must leave!
So it remains a mystery to me. Any thoughts are apreciated.
Lightseeker,
This is a good example of an invisible segment of the 'skeptical' community. In the same way, the population of yeshiva drop outs in new york and shabobniks in israel are also not going to be found on the blogs.
BH,
>Nothing personal DBS, but one of my main interests is in the difficulties of a non believer living in the frum world.
My children are frum and I still live in a very frum community. So even though I've 'come out of the closet' I still have to deal with some of these issues.
It's rough, whether you are public about your skepticism or not.
>My children are frum and I still live in a very frum community.
I didn't realize that. How do your kids handle it, that their father is a Koifer?
>So even though I've 'come out of the closet' I still have to deal with some of these issues.
That's true.
I see you've got the new post up. I'll check it out in the AM.
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