Opaque Mirrors and the Complexity of Belief

Pre-script: This post follows upon the previous one, though isn’t dependent on it.

Our lives are built on the foundation of our beliefs. This seems as self-evident as the beliefs that I hold; a conclusion so unavoidable that it makes any dissent seem ridiculous and misguided.

We all have them, but seldom store them in our minds: our beliefs have the tendency to filter down through the spongy matter of our brains and get caught in the beating cup of our hearts. The ideas which guide our lives are never simply things we think, but things we feel, things we KNOW.

Beliefs are fuzzy, squirming creatures: hard to pin down, almost impossible to dissect. I haven’t always believed this. For most of my life I though they were the product of rational thought. Ok, obviously not everyone’s, but definitely mine. Probably.

I’ve always tried to be rational, even when it was uncomfortable and forced me to change. So I fell prey to a kind of mental positivism, a science of ideas which solves all problems, if only we’d think hard enough.

I have since, in my dealing with philosophy, religion and doubt come to a different conclusion. The beliefs at our core are far from rational. They encapsulate the whole world for us, from our brains down to our genitals. When someone attacks them, it’s like a kick in the gut while our whole being is straining towards protecting our most precious assets.

I often find that the people with the most vaunted rational beliefs are the ones who have the deepest irrational reasons to protect them. I know this because I am one of them. It explains my fascination with philosophy, my euphoria at the discovery of Christian apologetics.

Because somewhere in me, I have always doubted, and that part of me wages war on the part that has always believed. My intellectualisation of the issues came after, it seems. This is something I often see. The people who have the greatest intellectual issues with religion are very often the ones who have been hurt and disappointed the most by religion and the inconstancy of its adherents. The emotion/moral problems underpin the intellectualisations.

The inverse is probably true of me. So when we talk, we’re not talking about God, we’re talking about a whole range of connotations that we might not even be aware of having.

That’s the big problem: the disconnect isn’t just philosophical. It bubbles up from below and mixes with what’s in your head until a mind “convinced against its will, will hold the same opinion still.” So can we ever truly engage authentically?

Only those who truly try will ever change their beliefs through reason, and even then it will take months or years. It is a painful, time-consuming process, ripping out a belief. The replacing idea needs to percolate all the way to your heart again, and while this happens you can only feel the hole left by the one you rejected.

So if I try to explain the reasons for my faith in Christ: Know that it is always a self-discovery to revisit your deeply held convictions. Know that it is never the whole picture. The workings of the heart is opaque to the mind, even when I try to delve deeper than regurgitated philosophy.

Know that all this might be true of you too. The hardest thing to do with ideas is engage them authentically. It leads to a life of discomfort.

But, given the choice, I will always choose the uncomfortable Truth over the slack-eyed stagnation of My truth.