(March 22, 2013 at 10:18 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Surround yourself with like-minded people.
This. If you were active in a particular religion, you found many ways to reinforce what you believed. You studied the religion, you read the books, you listened to the sermons, you meditated on it all, you discussed it with others who believed the same. This creates and reinforces the subconscious belief system. That's the bad thing about our subconscious: it'll "believe" any stupid shit that winds up in there. Even when we consciously know better, the subconscious drags us down.
My de-conversion was really very mild, because I drifted away from my religion and slowly lost contact with others involved in it, and I never had that moment where it all just fell apart at once. Even so, for some time after I'd accepted that I was an atheist, I'd wonder "what if they were right?" or "what if there was something I was missing?" But that's the subconscious, clinging to the garbage that I'd spent decades stuffing into it. The fact that my 'new' beliefs were so easily able to replace such deeply embedded beliefs made it easier to realize that the latter was garbage.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
