how to know things
i grew up in a cult.
you might not think it was a cult exactly, because frankly we're all a little too used to highcontrol religious behaviour, but it was a cult. it had (has--it's still around out there, though much diminished) all the hallmarks of a cult. and most important, it felt like a cult to me when i was in it.
i did a thing called "profession of faith" (adult and child baptists converge on a shared set of rituals though disagreeing vociferously about the order, which i've always found fascinating). i should not have done this. not that i didn't have faith, but i shouldn't have done it there. i should have left. i don't know why i didn't but i suspect it had something to do with the fact that everyone else was also doing it. it was just the thing to do. as part of my "profession of faith" interview one of the holiest of the elders, who you could tell was holy because they lived deep in the country and all their (too numerous) children behaved well and the girls wore plain dresses and never jeans which was important for reasons, asked me not to say "what the heck" because it was too close to the other phrase, which didn't take the bad place seriously. i chuckle these days because... what the hell, dude. textbook pharisee stuff.
elders in the church would do this thing once per year where they would come over to your house and give you pointers about how to live your life. this was largely proforma and theatrical. my parents would straighten the house and get all their (too numerous) children to dress up and behave on pain of one of their revolving set of punishments both mental and physical. to be clear if you weren't up for this sort of examination by men (always men, this was very important) who were just your peers but older and elected by others of your peers but older, you could technically be excommunicated, but no one really ever was, except in cases where they were already gone.
shortly after i did "profession of faith" i moved out of my parents house (i was the first of a few difficult children who were asked to leave), meaning i qualified for my own special elders visit in the humble basement apartment i was renting. it was not a nice place. but it was my place, so i decorated it my way. like for instance buying magazines with (gasp) tattoo art in it. ink on people's skin. that sort of dissolute behaviour. real antichrist stuff.
one of the elders, a guy who had capital-o opinions and wasn't afraid to make said opinions into other people's capital-p problems, used the washroom and saw the magazine on the toilet tank, opened it, and was shocked! utterly shocked! at what he saw. he came back into the room and gave me both barrels.
honestly, that was when i knew i was done. if this guy, whose primary doctrinal concerns seemed to be piercings and coloured hair and tattoos, was what the church had landed on to represent their priorities, then i'm not really sure what we're doing here. i wasn't interested in insular purity politics. and yeah sure it took me another 10 years to extricate myself from the reformosphere (i took a little detour into doomed romance that kept me around a little longer).
i'm getting off track here a little, but i do want to say there are a few things the reformed church gave me that i really do appreciate. catechism is one. ability to read--really read--the bible is another, though i think they would heartily disapprove of the way i read it now. that said most of it is toxic garbage and i wouldn't shed a tear if the entire reformed ecosystem was wiped from the face of the earth, with their impossible sola scriptura, and their god who is a monster.
if i had asked this elder (remember him? from a few paragraphs ago?) upon what foundation his antipathy for anything he didn't personally approve of in his back-to-the-50s fantasy world version of reality, i know exactly what he'd say. he made us memorize romans 12 after all!
"do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind"
i had actual trained pastors try this same sort of thing on me, by the way. you certainly must see the gap here: there're no particulars in this verse, no list of things that "the world" does that we should not be conformed to, and if there were they wouldn't be relevant to our elder with his tattooed hobbyhorse. like, i'm not going down to the temple of zeus or whatever to eat my meat consecrated to idols (though i do eat meat with the blood, which i guess we all decided to ignore, and were i to have tried greeting any of my brothers with a holy kiss..)
this is for me the difference between the scientific and the apologetic mindset. this is not philosophy, this is not rigorously logical, this is just a heuristic i've landed on because i'm obsessive and not at all normal
the apologetic approach to knowledgecraft is finding justifications for things you already believe. i think this is probably the baseline operating mode of the human brain--it's certainly the most common way folks think in my humble experience. it seems, at least to me, to be the most evolutionarily explicable. don't quote me on that, i'm not an evolutionary biologist or even just a regular biologist, nor do i know a lot about brains. i'm open to changing my mind on this.
but this is of course a crazy fragile way to think, esp if you've made a very big deal about how the scripturas are extremely sola. excuse me for thinking that if we're serious about our tulip (iykyk) we should be able to dive into the substrate of our belief, which is, we've been told, the bible, just the bible, only the bible, not tradition, and certainly not any old guys with pointy hats and/or beards, and recreate our cherished doctrinal positions which have, i shit you not, started wars, from first principles. that doesn't seem like too much to ask.
yet when you start really digging into it, you discover (quickly! this is not hard!) that oops, in fact it's mostly tradition. if you're particularly cynical, and i am, i assure you, extremely cynical, it's all tradition. everyone disagrees. there are 1000 flavours of christianity in the world at this very moment, not to mention over time.
so our doctrines and practices cannot be simply and obviously drawn from the pages of scripture--and this an important bit, so pay attention--not even the doctrine of sola scriptura itself.
oops.
i guess i don't like being asked to believe contradictory things. sorry. i'm the weird one here, because i don't like playing pretend.
anyways, that's apologetic thinking. it's mostly identity preservation, as far as i can tell, for folks who think their beliefs about this or that thing are more important than being right. which is a fair number of people it turns out! i don't mean to sound dismissive of this, as i think it's entirely natural, and probably even ok most of the time, but if my destiny in the afterlife depends on it, you've raised the stakes a fair bit. seems like we should, with that in view, labour to get things right.
what's crazy to me is how recently the scientific mode came along. we're not even a few hundred years into it, not really. the greeks didn't get to it. nor did the chinese. nor did the sumerians. maybe the kermese got to it and forgot to tell anyone.
the gist is that you're trying to craft knowledge that can withstand disconfirmation. this contrasts nicely with the apologetic mode as i'm sure you can see. you're going to come at your ideas with a hammer and see what happens instead of just trying to patch the ideas over time.
this is uncomfortable. i don't like doing it. but it does seem like an improvement, no? and to be clear, this is very obviously a spectrum, and doctrines do change over time in response to challenges, on the group level.
i do think a lot of what plagues us as humans comes down to apologetic thinking. i can't think of any other way to explain trickle-down-economics or other rightist twaddle.