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Blueberry comments on The Meditation on Curiosity - Less Wrong
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It is a complicated feeling. It is hard to adequately explain without delving into detail explanations of (a) my particular beliefs (b) the society of friends and family I inhabit and (c) a heck of a lot of personal history. I am not ready to deal with all of that here. I suspect bits and pieces will leak out.
The one thing I will say now is that it would completely wreck almost every aspect of my life. I have everything invested in this.
Since, at this point, I don't have much to think that critical examination will lead to me dropping Theism, it is still possible that it will strengthen Theism. I don't think it is more likely but I expect it would provoke a stronger reaction than my confession did.
If I really were scared enough to dodge critical examination I would be smart enough to drop anything that threatened a critical examination. As in, it wouldn't be given a foothold. I have enough power over my beliefs to choose what I want to believe. Right now, Rationality has my attention. If it scared me enough I would just leave and never return.
This hasn't happened and I do not expect it to happen. But if the situation were that dire, I would want to hold off on the critical examination until it was less scary.
For that to even make sense you have to give me the benefit of the doubt in terms of how I argue with myself. I don't expect it to translate well into other person's belief system. Also, it is very late... so... I don't promise anything and reserve the right to recant tomorrow. :)
Wow. Then it's not at all surprising you feel this way. You've left out a lot of details of your life, so I can't really comment on specifics (though please feel free to share them if you're ever ready to do so here). But given that, it's going to be almost impossible for you to change that belief.
I'm very confident that a detailed, unbiased examination of your theistic beliefs would reveal that there's no evidence for them and you hold them for social reasons. Do you agree? That being the case, you may not want to try to engage in this kind of examination right now. It sounds like you need time to think about what you really want in your life, and what kind of life you want to lead, independent of your beliefs about theism. Do you want to uproot your life right now?
Blueberry, the human species has got to do this sometime. Please don't get in the way.
I agree that humanity needs to do this sometime, and I agree that MrHen needs to do this sometime.
I don't know enough about MrHen's situation to know whether it's in his best interest to suddenly uproot himself from every aspect of his life right now, or whether there are ways of creating support networks and easing the transition that would help him. I'm not saying he should hide from the truth; I'm saying he may need to lay the groundwork for finding the truth first.
AFAIK these things just get more difficult the longer you put them off. This is the usual rule, and it's also the usual rule that people are heavily motivated on a cognitive level to find excuses to let things slide. Someone wrote about this very eloquently - I'm not sure who, possibly Tim Ferris or Robert Greene - with the notion that "hoping" things will get better isn't really hope so much as a form of passivity, motivated more by fear of action and change than any positive hope. Any delay of this sort should have a definite deadline attached to it.
I've found a definite (and not necessarily complete) list of steps to be useful in the absence of a deadline, and I think that's what Blueberry was getting at: MrHen might be best served by adding things to his to-do list that answer the question "what things do I need to do to get my personal life arranged in such a way that I would be able to be 'out' as an atheist without major repercussions?"