thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-02-26, Vincent wrote:
Hey Nate, you're very welcome.
You're right that I'm not religious. Well - I sometimes go to a UU church, but I don't believe in God or souls or an afterlife or anything like that.
Naturally, "what happened" was a whole long mess of things, over years of my life. One of the ways I sum it up to people is this:
At one point, I caught someone I trusted in a lie about a religious matter. I said to myself, "that's interesting. I wonder what else they're lying about?" So I started paying attention, and I learned to my shock that when it came to religion, they were all lying pretty much all the time.
Over the next, oh, decade, I learned to trust my conscience, and it's led me away from any kind of religious belief.
"Free will," though, I don't know about, that's an interesting question. I suppose I used to believe in free will - at least I professed belief in free will, as part of my religious dogma. Ever since I was a teenager, though, the idea of free will has seemed like an ideal or a polite abstraction or something. People behave as we behave; we can't change our own behavior without effort and practice. Does the idea of free will survive observations of humans being human? I don't know.
