Do you still *want* to believe?

by daniel-p 56 Replies latest jw friends

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  Darth Yhwh

  No. Life is far more interesting and awe-inspiring than crediting it to an imaginary invisible grandfather-figure in the sky.

  Well said Cygnus! I couldn't have put it better myself.
• 

  tetrapod.sapien

  i don't believe in anything much anymore. and that is a brilliant drug.
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  seattleniceguy

  No. I don't want to believe. I want to see clearly.

  Belief in the JW sense entails trying to see what one wishes were there. Desperately hoping for something, as if sheer longing alone will make it true, strikes me as a sad and vain way to live. I would much rather approach the reality with open eyes and try as hard as possible to understand what is actually there.

  In the classic Greek play Oedipus Rex, Oedipus learns a tragic truth about his father and mother. The play asks the question, would it have been better to remain ignorant? Is ignorance truly bliss? As a general principle, I believe that knowledge is always better than ignorance, even if the knowledge is distasteful, because the knowledge allows you to make informed, practical decisions. If you spend your life inside a set of untrue beliefs, over the course of your life, you will make many large decisions based on false premises. Becoming aware that your belief system is false is very painful, but it allows you to bring your worldview into greater harmony with reality. You can avoid the pain and loss that would have resulted from making life-altering decisions based on a faulty map. And the experience of changing your worldview causes you to grow and accept that in the future, you may need to make similar adjustments.

  You might be interested in reading M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. He writes about the pain of discarding cherished, but outdated, worldviews and the growth that takes place through the act. Changing one's views is one of the hardest things to do in life, he argues, and as a result, most people avoid it at all costs after settling into a comfortable one around the end of their teenage years. But there are certain types of growth that are impossible for a person who is unwilling to reassess their worldview from time to time and make fundamental changes.

  I certainly understand where you're coming from. When I was first exiting, I had moments of wishing, "If only it were true!" But I think once you've really seen it from the outside, you'll be glad you saw it for what it was.

  SNG
• 

  Narkissos

  SNG,

  Sophocles' Oedipus also points to the tragic ambivalence of knowledge-sight. Oedipus mocks the blind Tiresias who knows, and when he gets to know he blinds himself.
• 

  seattleniceguy

  Narkissos,

  Yes, I got the feeling that Sophocles felt that at times ignorance was the better route. Personally, I disagree. :-)

  SNG
• 

  imfreeimfree

  “Do you still “want” to believe”; yes and no.

  I no longer believe many of the doctrines promoted by the Society. My faith is now stronger in God; am spiritually more alive since abandoning the thinking sponsored by the WBTS organization.

  After examining both sides, it is possible to make an informed decision.

  Subsequent to reading the two books: “Crisis of Conscience” & “In Search of
  Christian Freedom”, written by former member of the governing Body, Ray Franz, I challenge anyone who would still “want to believe” the misinformation emanating from WBTS association. These publications are available at: www.commentarypress.com

  As one poster stated, I too: “…attempted to force myself to believe against my better judgement”, hoping that eventually the WBTS authorities would step off their lofty tower, stop going “beyond what is written”, discontinue persecuting the brothers who in all sincerity, on discovering discrepancies in the WBTS doctrines, question the meaning of such philosophies, only to find themselves facing judicial committees.

  In our (so far successful) fade, my wife and I also struggle with how much to say to our family and friends. We have decided to divulge the truth about the “truth” in small increments. Shock treatment does not work always. The gentle approach is more successful in most instances, IMHO. The analogy of fruit picking is fitting; when fruit is ripe it will come off easily with only a gentle tug, if not, it is not ready to pick.

  David
• 

  rmt1

  (None of this is worth reading, but it is worth writing, if the reader knows what the writer means. Reading Derrida is probably more useful.) Sure. Not the JW cosmology, which is too centralized, simplistic, elitist, inhuman, and draconian. In the childhood years, where there's a high ratio of received doctrine to empirical evidence, the christmas lights/choral convention singing causes a sweetly severe desire for there to be a Santa/God who will bring gifts/Armageddon. As the proportion of empirical to received knowledge flattens, then overtakes doctrine, the "desire" 'to believe' begins to dissipate. The fact that I now see nothing but a bleak, desolate, empty reality-truth in which all morality and convention is constructed, and where meaning is always already deconstructed by its own untransmissibility without the slippery statistical Heisenberg probabilities of language, does not mean that my metaphoric inner ear would not like to have strictly voluntary access to a divine or numinous power dialectic which generates more power for me in the form of dopamine than it extracts from me in the form of usages, obediences, loyalties, conventions, worships, sacrifices, et al. However, such a conveniently personalized divine or numinous power dialectic is like a perpetual motion machine - such a thing cannot exist. As well, voluntary access to any dialectic means it's not a dialectic: for there to be real meaning, relations or proportions of power, one must abrogate mobility and allow oneself to be planted at a certain point along the dialectic. You rarely "want to believe" when you are already in the dialectic predicated upon the doctrine that you must believe, and you must like it, and you cannot mobilize. When you don't still believe, you don't want to abrogate mobility. One of the key motivations for Cypher's willingness to get plugged back into the Matrix is that he had the ability to opt for un-knowing. Unless an ex-JW has an extensive lobotomy, there is no way to unknow the terrible (JW) experiences that often prevent a "desire to believe" being mobilized even along different doctrinal/denominational/eschatological vectors. If you read this I cannot give you back your two minutes.
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  Is this the same as "Do I wish what I used to believe was actually true?"

  Paradise, living forever, good health, all that -- that woulda been sweet. I can't see it being boring, it woulda been great. All the cold bodies right after Armageddon woulda sucked, especially the ones I knew.

  Hmmmm.. maybe I'm glad it isn't true. :-/

  But since it *isn't* true, I'm definitely glad I don't believe it anymore.

  Dave
• 

  skyman

  Heeeell no !!!
• 

  Narkissos

  rmt1

  As Derrida was discussing negative theology as a possible way -- quite admirative of its formulative economy yet wary of its being the Trojan horse for the comeback of ontology sub specie contraria -- he once wrote something like "I cannot decide for there is no one left in me to decide".