Chewing on New Ideas...

The book I am currently reading, an essay that I just finished reading and an interview which lead to another book on my TBR list have all touched on a new idea, or new to me, or new way of phrasing an idea anyway. We have (we in the general) replaced a god centered religion with a non-deity centered faith based system. 

We are all still deeply religious but now instead of there being a god or gods at the center of it all it's a belief. Part of the tribalism. We use celebrities or political affiliations or social stances as the center of our "religion" and then switch from using our Thinking Rational brains to deal with information we use our Feeling Faith Based brains. 

And you cannot use a Thinking brain to change the beliefs of a Feeling brain. 

In fact the more deeply held a belief in the Feeling brain the more tap dancing and cherry picking it will do when presented by facts to show how those don't matter.

I've talked about the tribalism before. And I've talked about the difference in believing something and something actually being true. But this was a new thought for me. That it's actually become religion. And once a religion takes hold it's really difficult to root it out. 

Some of us have done it; left a religion we were raised with. And any one of us who has can tell you it's hard. It's a foundational shift. And that's a really small phrase for what that means. Just imagine you are sitting in your house right now and the foundation moves. What happens to the entire house that is built on that foundation? Right? Now you can understand. It's not a little thing. It's everything you are that it is woven into in some way. Even things you don't think about daily. It will be years before you find all of the damage that was done by the change. 

And I've talked about how I feel like I'm pretty good at saying "I don't know" or changing my mind about things when given better facts because I went through leaving the church. But even then I know at times I've had to catch myself when looking at information thinking, "This doesn't feel right" instead of just looking at the facts for what they are. Now, I will also say that often when something doesn't feel right it's because it isn't. But that's not because of the feelings, it's because the facts have been presented incorrectly. Whole numbers instead of percentage of the whole comparisons and such. But what has to happen when you get a "this doesn't feel right" twinge is not that you dismiss everything out of hand, it means you have to look at the source material yourself. You need to understand what you are seeing. 

Not, "Do your own research" where you find three opinion articles that agree with you and dismiss the 200 that don't. But actual, where did this chart come from? What numbers were pulled for this comparison and yes, sometimes, who funded this study? What is their goal?

When I finish the two books with the concepts in them I might write more about it. Especially when I get the second one, because it's going to be challenging some things I really believe so I might be angry posting about that one...because being right is my religion. 

Kidding. 

Sort of.   

But for now I'm chewing on the ideas. And they are really interesting.