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Rationality
Dec. 6th, 2018 09:27 pmSo I used to be pagan, of the Wiccan variety, and in about 2006 I left my coven.
I left because nothing felt right, nothing felt effective, and I am one of those people who likes to write things down. That becomes a problem when you read tarot and go back over your readings later to see what was truthful and what was merely conjecture. And if you notice that you are doing less well than chance on your conjecture-to-truth ratio, it is really hard to believe your own bullshit. So I stopped reading tarot, and started looking at the other things I believed, to see what might be used as fertilizer. And pretty much everything I believed wound up in the compost heap.
Weirdly, I didn't miss it. I miss some of the people from those days, and the strong sense of community that we had as an actually-persecuted religious minority.
I don't miss believing in things, or trying to effect change using means that have been proven not to work. But once I was on the path of disbelieving, I started finding other things to believe in, like the inherent humanity of the people I live in this world with. And then I was on the path to finding policies and data that actually started making sense of the parts of the world that I had been labeling as nonsense and stupid. If you have to label a big section of the world "stupid nonsense" then you are probably missing something fundamental about that part of the world, possibly multiple somethings.
It never seemed a good use of my time to doubt everything I knew, when I was young. But I think I can be forgiven for that.
I left because nothing felt right, nothing felt effective, and I am one of those people who likes to write things down. That becomes a problem when you read tarot and go back over your readings later to see what was truthful and what was merely conjecture. And if you notice that you are doing less well than chance on your conjecture-to-truth ratio, it is really hard to believe your own bullshit. So I stopped reading tarot, and started looking at the other things I believed, to see what might be used as fertilizer. And pretty much everything I believed wound up in the compost heap.
Weirdly, I didn't miss it. I miss some of the people from those days, and the strong sense of community that we had as an actually-persecuted religious minority.
I don't miss believing in things, or trying to effect change using means that have been proven not to work. But once I was on the path of disbelieving, I started finding other things to believe in, like the inherent humanity of the people I live in this world with. And then I was on the path to finding policies and data that actually started making sense of the parts of the world that I had been labeling as nonsense and stupid. If you have to label a big section of the world "stupid nonsense" then you are probably missing something fundamental about that part of the world, possibly multiple somethings.
It never seemed a good use of my time to doubt everything I knew, when I was young. But I think I can be forgiven for that.