Maybe you’ll lie for the whole rest of your life. Maybe you will lie until your kids are out of the house. Maybe you’ll lie for another few weeks or years and then decide the truth is important enough to you that Shulem’s story no longer seems worse to you than living with the lie.
People lie all the time, and I think it would be foolish to try to craft a life in which you never lie, or in which you feel horribly guilty about lying. Maybe there is some society in which it makes sense not to lie for everybody, but maybe there isn’t, either. Certainly a society such as your own is NOT that society. Your society enforces an appearance of conformity of agreement on certain matters of “fact” which are not obviously matters of fact at all. For you to fall foul of this enforcement is a purely voluntary action on your part. I suppose if there were a magical creature who could read your mind and who would punish you for lying, one might make the case that your best bet would be to tell the truth and take the societal consequences which are less severe than the consequences imposed by the magical creature. In some sense, this is analogous to choosing to one-box in the Newcomb’s box problem: rationality means winning. For you to take societal consequences for telling the truth when the truth you are telling is that there is no magical creature reading your mind and enforcing rules about what it must contain, well, that is irrational to the extent that it involves making a choice to lose.
To the extent I can imagine being in your situation, my main concern would be getting my kids out. In my own personal lying, I never lie to my kids except if I think it is for their own good, not mine. Of course, you obviously love your Hasidic life so much that you mgiht believe that lying to your kids to keep them in theirs is for their own good, and far be it from me to tell you you would be wrong. I am very aware that for me, an intelligent physicist engineer, the “cost” of false belief in the supernatural is much higher than it is for the clerk in my department who lives her entire life at her Jehovah’s Witness church. She witnessed an atheist discussion between myself and someone else once and sent me fairly naive reasons she should stay in her belief, and I responded, and I meant it, that she should believe if that is what she needed to make her life work.
Honestly, I think your real difference from your peers is not that you found the reasons not to believe, but that you couldn’t convince yourself to ignore them! For myself, I give you great credit for being like that, which is small consolation I imagine for risking the loss of your family and your life. I was lucky to come from a family which was already fairly liberal (compared to hasidism anyway) about religion and in which about half of them in my parents’ generation leaned towards atheism anyway. I have the luxury of living in a society which barely has the energy to even complain about my atheism, in which my atheism is as vibrant and powerful as their religiosity. If I lived in a society that punished atheism, I would lie about it. I would go only as far as I could go publicly without risking the things I found important. My own version of one-boxing: I do NOT sacrifice myself for abstract beliefs.
Ironically, I will close by suggesting you have faith. Don’t be more publicly atheistic now than you can. Chances are if you hide it now that you may find over the coming years your trade-off point moves towards more exposure, more openness. Enjoy your life: we ALL live in medieval mind-controlling societies, the differences are matters of degrees rather than matters of kind. Enjoy the one you are in and make a difference on the margin. In real life, we are not truth-seeking machines, we are life-seeking machines. Our brains evolved to serve our lives, to invert that, and have a life which serves your brain is hardly required, especially once you understand that magical mind-reading controlling creatures probably do not exist.
Lie.
Maybe you’ll lie for the whole rest of your life. Maybe you will lie until your kids are out of the house. Maybe you’ll lie for another few weeks or years and then decide the truth is important enough to you that Shulem’s story no longer seems worse to you than living with the lie.
People lie all the time, and I think it would be foolish to try to craft a life in which you never lie, or in which you feel horribly guilty about lying. Maybe there is some society in which it makes sense not to lie for everybody, but maybe there isn’t, either. Certainly a society such as your own is NOT that society. Your society enforces an appearance of conformity of agreement on certain matters of “fact” which are not obviously matters of fact at all. For you to fall foul of this enforcement is a purely voluntary action on your part. I suppose if there were a magical creature who could read your mind and who would punish you for lying, one might make the case that your best bet would be to tell the truth and take the societal consequences which are less severe than the consequences imposed by the magical creature. In some sense, this is analogous to choosing to one-box in the Newcomb’s box problem: rationality means winning. For you to take societal consequences for telling the truth when the truth you are telling is that there is no magical creature reading your mind and enforcing rules about what it must contain, well, that is irrational to the extent that it involves making a choice to lose.
To the extent I can imagine being in your situation, my main concern would be getting my kids out. In my own personal lying, I never lie to my kids except if I think it is for their own good, not mine. Of course, you obviously love your Hasidic life so much that you mgiht believe that lying to your kids to keep them in theirs is for their own good, and far be it from me to tell you you would be wrong. I am very aware that for me, an intelligent physicist engineer, the “cost” of false belief in the supernatural is much higher than it is for the clerk in my department who lives her entire life at her Jehovah’s Witness church. She witnessed an atheist discussion between myself and someone else once and sent me fairly naive reasons she should stay in her belief, and I responded, and I meant it, that she should believe if that is what she needed to make her life work.
Honestly, I think your real difference from your peers is not that you found the reasons not to believe, but that you couldn’t convince yourself to ignore them! For myself, I give you great credit for being like that, which is small consolation I imagine for risking the loss of your family and your life. I was lucky to come from a family which was already fairly liberal (compared to hasidism anyway) about religion and in which about half of them in my parents’ generation leaned towards atheism anyway. I have the luxury of living in a society which barely has the energy to even complain about my atheism, in which my atheism is as vibrant and powerful as their religiosity. If I lived in a society that punished atheism, I would lie about it. I would go only as far as I could go publicly without risking the things I found important. My own version of one-boxing: I do NOT sacrifice myself for abstract beliefs.
Ironically, I will close by suggesting you have faith. Don’t be more publicly atheistic now than you can. Chances are if you hide it now that you may find over the coming years your trade-off point moves towards more exposure, more openness. Enjoy your life: we ALL live in medieval mind-controlling societies, the differences are matters of degrees rather than matters of kind. Enjoy the one you are in and make a difference on the margin. In real life, we are not truth-seeking machines, we are life-seeking machines. Our brains evolved to serve our lives, to invert that, and have a life which serves your brain is hardly required, especially once you understand that magical mind-reading controlling creatures probably do not exist.
Mazel Tov, Mike