Request for input: draft of my "coming out" statement on religious deconversion

Gotcha. I'm still not sure my specific readership will say, as you put it, "An, an atheist -- tl;dr," but I'll keep thinking about this. I hoped it would be concise (not necessarily 1 page, but not 10, either). As with most of my things, it ended up much longer than I expected. Thanks for the continued input.

I just finished reading it, and I found it quite moving. It has a few minor syntax errors, but other than that it's good.

Thanks! I got some specific corrections from a blog reader; I'll update and re-upload the new version to avoid repeat corrections. Glad you liked it.

...your family is an order of magnitude larger than mine...

Well, community of religious believers. The family who will receive this, if any, is probably only ~20 strong. Which, in that case, perhaps I should wait until the next family get together to announce in person. Though, the best time tends to be at meal time, and the last time that would have happened, I got asked to pray at Thanksgiving because my family thinks I'm the "holy one." I didn't think it was the best time to deny or announce my nonbelief... so, embarrassed as I am to admit it, I faked it. Apparently, they didn't know the difference.

There's a danger that some people might find your document a bit, well, preachy...

Fair enough. My brother commented that it was "processy." I could see taking my explicit explanation of how I go about things as implying that however they went about their belief isn't as good as mine and thus they would deconvert if they investigated as well. I'll keep that in mind.

Many, many thanks for reading the whole thing and providing input.

The conclusion was also written on the very early side :)

Re. the Outsider Test, one of the most eye opening things for me, albeit recently and much post-deconversion, was listening to an Islamic convert from Christianity (example). While I still might not agree with his reasons, it was enlightening to hear someone talk with passion, conviction, reasons, scriptural backings, and so forth about a completely alien faith... all while using the same language, emotion, and excitement that I did about my faith.

Good point, though Catholics are (can be?) pretty darn mild when it comes to hell. My wife and surrounding community are super tame concerning things like that. There's no outright judgment, but they still probably pray for the future of my soul.

I also plan on opposing things that seem to be unjustified/unreasonable outright. Hell would be one. First communion at age seven is another example. No child can comprehend what they need to in order to profess that a wafer just had it's essence turned into the flesh of a non-physical deity while retaining all of its physical characteristics.

While things seem to be okay at the moment, we haven't crossed a time-sensitive binary option bridge like communion yet. Thus, I don't know what the reaction will be toward my resistance. My wife is very sensitive to her social environment and I think she will feel a lot of guilt and shame for not having her kids go through visible rituals like the sacraments (like everyone else's kids).

Not to mention, once they're at that age, all of our friends' kids will be receiving communion and ours will be sitting there. This will be a stab in the heart every single week.

Thanks for clarifying.

Indeed, I'm no pro. Thanks for the clarification!

Do the great majority of cases of not being significantly enough affected by losing such relationships to prevent the avoidance of the loss of the relationship from being primarily engendered by the sunk-cost fallacy imply the presence of sociopathy?

(I'm trying to see if I understand the implications of your statement properly. I would think there could be other factors involved that wouldn't necessarily prevent the relationship from being considered valued. Perhaps those are rare enough to not affect your statement.)

Whew, though I'd like to know what shminux thinks, too. Actually, I think I already know -- whether the comment was edited, or I just missed it... I didn't see the "and split, if your wife..." in his response.

What about other options:

• She doesn't deconvert. We remain married, happily.
• She doesn't deconvert. We remain married, unhappily.

I also predict she could get an annulment pretty easily given my deconversion, which adds another option:

• I divorce her. She gets married when she's ready and is not ousted from the Catholic community.

Also, it seems like you've honed in on the beliefs of my children and wife as the most important factors (with a side of my wife's future unhappiness, but I'm not sure if you counted that toward the weakening of overall religious influence). Do you think there are other factors to weigh?

In any case, I find the most valuable point to be your reminder to me that this is long term. I've tried to keep that in mind, though weighting near unhappiness vs. far improvement is definitely a potential trap. I'm 27 and thus probably do have more than 10 years.

Nonetheless, it still strikes me as a complex situation and I'm not settled on how to judge potential future states and sum the collective happinesses of the stakeholders.

How about this:

1. She doesn't deconvert. The extended Catholic community preserves the story of how jwhendy became an evil atheist and abandoned his wife and children as a result.

Bit harsh on the wife, though...

Oh, I didn't realize you had kids. Should have figured it out, given your religious background.

Might I suggest you work on your tact in human interactions?

Re. a split simply in the proximity sense, that did occur to me/us during a particularly low point -- mostly from my wife in order to help me figure out what I want. I think if I were in a lower emotional state, I'd consider that option more.

Great question! I was quite surprised to read this, and think it's quite the valid reply. In pondering it... my answer would come in a couple of ways.

1) There's nothing intrinsically different. If someone says "I believe in big bang cosmology" and has no trackable fact/reasoning path back to "why," they are unjustified in believing in big bang cosmology. Now, perhaps it will track back to "everyone talks as if the big bang is legit" or "I always see these articles that talk about the big bang and so I guess I figured it was real." Fair enough; belief based on authority/word-of-mouth alone isn't the greatest reason for belief, but they could track it to something at least.

2) The [probably not unique] term, "epistemic baggage" occurred to me as I thought about this. For example, what comes along with or is implied based on believing that the big bang happened? The universe exists? Entropy won't decrease on its own? Something happened and that's why we're here? I don't see a ton of practical implications from believing the big bang, at least for the layman.

Similarly, from a survey of the landscape... science has tended to converge about the big bang.

What about religion? 2000 years (or ~1400 years post-Islam (or ~150 years post-Mormonism (or ~50 years post-Scientology))) has not brought a convergence of religious truth. It could be, as you say, that we just don't have the theories and methods of analyzing the landscape well enough yet to judge between them.

Or it could be that they offer nothing objectively testable or predictive and thus beliefs can co-exist without clashing (there's never going to be a showdown where we get rid of all these silly heresies).

In any case (answering my second point first), religions have not converged. At a time when there were many competing cosmologies, I think it would have been equally odd to take a stand for big bang cosmology because some minority said it was true. Now, knowing the field and then comparing competing ideas would allow one to be justified in professing belief in cosmology -- they have surveyed the landscape and made the best call they could (even better would be to believe with some sort of confidence interval).

This is where we are with religion, yet billions of believers are professing near 100% confidence in their beliefs without having surveyed anything at all -- apologetics, other religions, other holy texts, etc. And we are not living in the religious analog to big bang scientific consensus in order for that to allow hiding behind.

Lastly, there is far more practical (well, theoretically, but I'll get to that) baggage with religion. To profess belief isn't to accept simple things like "I'm here, and the big bang implies how I got here" (you already know your here -- how does the method it came about affect your life?). It's to profess things like bread turning into the flesh of a man, the state of an immortal soul, that the mind isn't what the brain does, and that we can know what god wants us to do with our lives by asking him to speak to us, and that we fell from a more perfect state by "sinning" among other things. There's waaay more baggage associate with professing religious belief compared to whatever you think led to our universe.

I said above practical yet theoretical because the above are technically what doctrine is supposed to require of its believers, but I doubt most of them think about these things to any degree. Thus, it's mostly going through the motions, social bonding/comfort/security, and feeling good by doing good deeds that will please the god they think is watching.

I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all...

Hard to tell what you meant. I didn't mean to ask whether you accept their belief as providing evidence for theism... only whether or not you think their belief is justified given the level of knowledge you expect from me not to believe.

Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind.

But I still don't understand the meaning of that default explanation... and so I just meant "what types of things count as fitting the definition of 'largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics'?" (I think you answered it in your next bit, though.)

But that you're a member of LessWrong means there's a fair bit of pressure on you to believe whatever LessWrong thinks it's good to believe...

My deconversion was significantly in motion prior to finding LessWrong (first doubts in Dec 2009, first comment here in Jan 2011, which suggests I might have found LW from this post from Jul 2010?).

...the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.

How would I identify whether this is or is not the case, especially if they are unconscious?

I think this idea of a religion being true or false is clearly misguided; it's more a question of how you interpret the world and what institutions allow for more and more-justified optimization of the world, which is heavily contingent on pragmatics of human psychology.

I like how you put that, and thanks for the explanation re. Vassar and Tarleton. I definitely approached my "quest" with the primary focus of trying to determine whether or not there was a deity who cared what I did and whether or not the Catholic faith had something special with respect to such a deity's wishes/plans/texts/etc.

You continue to return to social/pragmatic aspects, which continues to leave me puzzled as to whether you think the Catholic Church's primary advantage is that it's most aligned with the wishes/truths concerning a god of some sort, or whether it's beliefs are just a side effect and what really matters is that it has the best social/pragmatic rules/suggestions for human beings of any competing religion.

This is why I emphasized social psychology and game theory, because doing thorough analyses of questions like these is simply too difficult.

Gotcha, and I'm glad they didn't seem difficult only to me :)

After reading all that, though, it still leaves me puzzled that a being who wants us to know about it would reveal itself (bible) in a time when we had none of these probability and game theories, and no formal study of social psychology.

After I had those I could look into Kant or Aquinas and be impressed, but I don't know if I would have realized the depth of their arguments if I hadn't thought about the moral philosophy and decision theory on my own first.

After reading this post, I think it would be fantastic if you simply laid out some x-part series here on LW specifying more about your current beliefs. At the moment, they seem paradoxically very strong yet vague. As in, you strike me as being rather confident in theism (or various theistic tenets) while typically offering very vague statements about specifically what they are (more on this in a different response, as it fits better there).

My read of this post/threads suggest that what happened is that you came out and asked "Why is theism wrong?" Then a bunch (like ~500) comments took place explaining various objections, and you concluded that everyone was attacking someone else's theism, which isn't what you hold or think is really theism.

Perhaps a new post with specifics might help more (or point me to more of that if it already exists).

Thanks for the dialog.

Huh. What, then, do you believe when it comes to a deity? I may have misread this comment, but it strikes me as saying that you're Catholic for pragmatic/social reasons?

Put another way: what of Catholic doctrine counts as as "largely some really tricky game theory" and what counts as actually true?

From what I know of Vladimir_M, to the extent he's a Catholic, he believe Catholicism is intersubjectively true. He doesn't take simulation hypothesis/accusal trade/SL5 type arguments all that seriously if that's what you're asking.