I realized at some point that I have grown at least as much in the things that I stopped believing as in the things that I started to believe. Here are a few things that I no longer believe.


1. That there is only one game in town worth playing
Some people think the only game in town worth playing is science, others think it's some form of Christianity, or Islam, or even money, or politics. They may disagree on what game it is, but they can all agree that there is only one game in town worth playing. I do not believe that.



2. That complete objectivity is either possible or desirable
The very act of exploring one particular question instead of another question implies that we have some interest in the result. Why should we try to convince others or ourselves of our objectivity? If we report something, either we think the subject matters or we do not, and if we do not think it matters, why speak at all? Far better that we should acknowledge our own motivations, not only so that we can prevent them from interfering with our work, but more significantly, so that we can put them into more active use toward our goal.



3. That beliefs are either true or false, or that the same is the only worthwhile way of evaluating them
To illustrate, I could start by going into all manner of technical discussion on the law of the excluded middle, but I think a more aesthetic approach will do better. Let me first quote from a beautiful article by Bill Heidrick..

According to the Qabalistic legend, there was first the Torah before the creation of the World, the Torah of the Void... This Invisible Torah contains the utterance that issued forth to create all things in the Universe. It was called a book, because it holds knowledge. If you can gain a bit of that knowledge, you have that much power... Take that idea, generalize it a little bit and modernize it. There's always a tendency to put down these stories as: "Oh yeah." "Back when." "Wonder what it would be like." "Isn't that marvelous," and other rationalizations to avoid serious consideration. The concept is perfectly valid and perfectly modern. What do you think science is? In this way of speaking, one can say that it is simply the attempt to recover the language of the Invisible Torah, the ways of thinking and knowing that can create and uncreate the world. A Hydrogen Bomb is the same thing that happens in the Sun, not something vaguely like that. It is the same thing. The only difference is size. The people who developed the Hydrogen bomb learned the word for "sun" in the Invisible Torah. They learned the word for the power of that. One of the scientists watching the first explosion of a nuclear weapon was minded to quote from the "Bhagavad Gita", and said; "Now I am come, the destroyer of worlds"*. These things are the true magical book. The language in which that book is written is not any one human tongue, but the pure language of thought...

*That scientist was Oppenheimer. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

If the Invisible Torah were a physical book, and if we could read it, then the words in it would be The Truth. But if we cannot get G_d to teach us the language and read to us from the book, then we will have to settle for our best re-creation of it. The result of our efforts will be a book in a language we have created and layed out in an arrangement that seems reasonable to us.

If there were an Invisible Torah, and we were not allowed to look over G_d's shoulder to copy from it directly, then we should not expect that the words and grammar of the language we create for our edition would match up with the words and grammar of the original, nor would there be any reason to expect that ours would include the same things in the same chapters. We could only hope to create an increasingly equivalent text.

Even once we had finished making our version of the book, having exhausted our method for refining it, we would have to acknowledge that ours was not the only way to write it. A piece of someone else's edition, even if it matched up well with the Invisible Torah, could easily appear conflicting with the book we have produced.



4. That jealousy is a virtuous or even acceptable trait in ourselves or our gods

These last two I will let stand on their own, at least for now



5. That different people should have the same beliefs, or that a given person should believe the same thing all the time




crossposted to my journal and [info]convert_me