“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”
Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.
What you don’t know about your own religion is that if you are like most people, certain of your tenets are going to be non-negotiable—even if they are wrong.
You may be quite reasonable about some of what you believe, and open to new information and new reasoning alike. But on other topics, you may well refuse new information and reasoning quite adamantly, while not even noticing that this is behavior of which you would disapprove if you were to see someone else doing it about his own religion.
It’s important to understand that in almost every church, we are taught to believe, and not to be honest, rational, and responsible about how we manage our beliefs. Whether we would truly think so or not, this at least implies that we believe that our own church must be right about everything! But really, how unlikely is that? Indeed! Do we know of any other church camp that we think is right about everything? By what miracle, then, has it come to be that it just happens to be the one we go to that has got it right, while all the other camps are wrong?
But we know deep down inside that we are not busy examining all our religious beliefs, in order to check them across from the Bible, and to see if they are consistently held and applied. What we tend to do, therefore, is to rely heavily on assumptions. And my point is that, however we arrive at the mix, some of those assumptions are going to be non-negotiable for us, and no amount of new information or of reasoning is going to change our minds, because we have been taught that “faith” is sticking to our guns, no matter what. And that’s how the camps stay separated, for they have all taught themselves that they’re doing the right thing to stay away from the rest—just as the rest have been taught about them.
And you can call me crazy, but I don’t think that this is what Jesus had in mind for the people who believe in him. But, then, maybe I’ve hit upon one of those non-negotiable subjects here, and you’re just not very interested in what I think.
