No, Really, I've Deceived Myself

55 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 March 2009 11:29PM

Followup toBelief in Belief

I recently spoke with a person who... it's difficult to describe.  Nominally, she was an Orthodox Jew.  She was also highly intelligent, conversant with some of the archaeological evidence against her religion, and the shallow standard arguments against religion that religious people know about.  For example, she knew that Mordecai, Esther, Haman, and Vashti were not in the Persian historical records, but that there was a corresponding old Persian legend about the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar, and the rival Elamite gods Humman and Vashti.  She knows this, and she still celebrates Purim.  One of those highly intelligent religious people who stew in their own contradictions for years, elaborating and tweaking, until their minds look like the inside of an M. C. Escher painting.

Most people like this will pretend that they are much too wise to talk to atheists, but she was willing to talk with me for a few hours.

As a result, I now understand at least one more thing about self-deception that I didn't explicitly understand before—namely, that you don't have to really deceive yourself so long as you believe you've deceived yourself.  Call it "belief in self-deception".

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