Shift of truth

[Angrboda]

I think that's the effect of having an epiphany. Is it that this woman started reading the Bible and thought okay, this makes sense to me? Or was there a moment when she experienced a moment of clarity, or understanding, or 'the hand of GOD' or some other transcendent feeling? Lots of people claim to experience the latter, and it can mark a huge shift in how they perceive the world. When you think about it, something like the half-life of uranium... why did she accept that it was 4.5 billion years before? She read it or heard it, most likely, and accepted it as it had no particular impact on her life. To believe that now could impact her new reality, and so when she reads or hears that it's really 5,000 it is more meaningful. To her it helps to confirm her new reality. It's not just a random factoid, it becomes an underpinning of her belief system.

It can happen gradually, too, though. My Hinduism is an accretion of thousands of events over the years. I think, the mind has a 'trajectory', for lack of a better word, and that trajectory asserts a stronger influence on what a person does and will believe than any assessment of beliefs in the rational sense. There are a number of cognitive biases which, combined, create the effect that the mind moves in a specific direction, towards ideologies or whatnot, largely independent of any intervening facts or experiences which seemingly 'should' prevent that mind from embracing the facts, beliefs, and worldview that it does end up embracing. The mind seems to have a strange kind of inertia that requires more than ordinary reason to counteract.