objectivity and preferences

Sometimes I can offer some valuable insight about the inner life of the "other side": religious followers who construct their thoughts and behavior on top of traditional supernatural beliefs. (I estimate that I was like that for around the first 29 years of life—drawing a hard line between these phases is difficult.) Without this sort of insight, people can run into problems when they try to reach religious followers with sensible reasoning. Their statements can fail to connect with their audience due to overlooking an important point.

This is the case when someone comments that the beliefs are unattractive in some way. Why should someone sacrifice so much for beliefs that are at the very least off-putting and at most repugnant? How can someone disregard their feelings of repulsion when they're selecting the beliefs that they're committing to?

Yet the attempt to raise these excellent questions is missing a particular twistedness in religious followers' perspectives. Their view is almost the reverse. To them the difference between the beliefs and their preferences is evidence for the beliefs' objectivity. As they see it, if a belief were entirely subjective or invented, then following (or discarding) the belief actually would be a matter of preference. Some of them might even say it out loud, although their tone is firmly ironic. "A sense of unease proves that I wouldn't make these ideas up for myself. And I'm not fooling myself with ideas that I find comforting. I wish I could choose what to think according to my personal wants. But I simply can't do that, just as I can't choose to think that I can grow money on trees." They might say that it's similar to the challenge of appreciating an authentically prepared dish from a different culinary culture, or similar to the way that an accurate portrayal of ancient societies' ways appears more or less monstrous to contemporary people. 

In addition, it's crucial to remember that many followers—some more than others—aren't for one moment giving equal consideration to the radical concept that their supernatural ideas are groundless. It's not a fair competition from the start of the conversation. They aren't facing a fork in the road; they're already located a mile past the fork in the direction of the beliefs. To seriously consider the alternative, they'd need to backtrack on multiple principles first. The beliefs were taught in the form of indisputable facts at the same time as they were taught indisputable facts about gravity and the number of minutes in an hour.

I'd think of this factor as an attitude as much as it is a mindset. When they're justifying distastefulness as a sign of unsettling objectivity, their base attitude is "I have this set of integrated beliefs and my goal is to identify minimal reasons to permit myself to keep it." If their religiosity has been a vital part of them, then they're reluctant to give it up. The attitude they need, which is a significant shift, is "This set of integrated beliefs is a possible set of many that I could have and my goal is to identify competitive reasons to adopt it rather than adopting the rest."

The shift in attitude can happen. But the defense mechanisms are formidable, like perversely turning ideas' disturbingness into an advantage. For the determined person who's not open to honest self-examination, rationalization is practically infinite in what it can do.