What others already said: Don’t try to reverse stupidity by avoiding everything conected to Catholicism. You are allowed to pick the good pieces and ignore the bad pieces, instead of buying or rejecting the whole package. Catholics also took some good parts from other traditions; which by the way means you don’t even have to credit them for inventing the good pieces you decide to take.
If you talk with other religious people, they will probably try the following trick on you: Give you a huge book saying that it actually answers all your questions, and that you should at least read this one book and consider it seriously before you abandon religion completely. Of course if you read the whole book and it doesn’t convince you, they will give you another huge book. And another. And another. The whole strategy is to surround you by religion memes (even more strongly than most religious people are), hoping that sooner or later something will “trigger” your religious feelings. And no matter how many books you read, if at some moment you refuse to read yet another book, you will be accused of leaving the religion only because of your ignorance and stubbornness, because this one specific book certainly did contain all answers to your questions and perfectly convincing counterarguments to your arguments, you just refused to even look at it. This game you cannot win: there is no “I have honestly considered all your arguments and found them unconvincing” exit node; the only options given to you are either to give up, or to do something that will allow your opponents to blame you of being willfully ignorant. (So you might as well do the “ignorant” thing now, and save yourself a lot of time.)
Don’t try to convince other people, at least not during the first months after deconversion. First, you need to sort out things for yourself (you don’t have a convincing success story yet). Second, by the law of reciprocation, if the other people were willing to listen to your explanations, this in turn gives them the moral right to give you a huge book of religious arguments and ask you to read it, which leads to the game described above.
Basicly, realize that you have a right to spend most of your time without thinking about Catholicism, either positively or negatively. That is what most atheists really do. If you were born on another planet, where religion wasn’t invented, you wouldn’t spend your time arguing against religion. Instead, you would just do what you want to do. So do it now.
It reminds me of Transactional Analysis saying the best way to keep people in mental traps is to provide them two scripts: “this is what you should do if you are a good person”, but also “this is what you will do if you become a bad person (i.e. if you refuse the former script)”. So even if you decide to rebel, you usually rebel in the prescribed way, because you were taught to only consider these two options as opposites… while in reality there are many other options available.
The real challenge is to avoid both the “good script” and the “bad script”.
Thank you for the advice. I’ve started by rereading the scientific explanations of the big bang, evolution, and basically most general scientific principles. Looking at it without constant justification going on in my mind is quite refreshing.
So far I’ve been able to avoid most of the arguments, though I was surprised by how genuinely sad some people were. I’m going to keep quiet about religion for a while, and figure out what other pieces of my worldview I need to take a rational, honest look at.
What others already said: Don’t try to reverse stupidity by avoiding everything conected to Catholicism. You are allowed to pick the good pieces and ignore the bad pieces, instead of buying or rejecting the whole package. Catholics also took some good parts from other traditions; which by the way means you don’t even have to credit them for inventing the good pieces you decide to take.
If you talk with other religious people, they will probably try the following trick on you: Give you a huge book saying that it actually answers all your questions, and that you should at least read this one book and consider it seriously before you abandon religion completely. Of course if you read the whole book and it doesn’t convince you, they will give you another huge book. And another. And another. The whole strategy is to surround you by religion memes (even more strongly than most religious people are), hoping that sooner or later something will “trigger” your religious feelings. And no matter how many books you read, if at some moment you refuse to read yet another book, you will be accused of leaving the religion only because of your ignorance and stubbornness, because this one specific book certainly did contain all answers to your questions and perfectly convincing counterarguments to your arguments, you just refused to even look at it. This game you cannot win: there is no “I have honestly considered all your arguments and found them unconvincing” exit node; the only options given to you are either to give up, or to do something that will allow your opponents to blame you of being willfully ignorant. (So you might as well do the “ignorant” thing now, and save yourself a lot of time.)
Don’t try to convince other people, at least not during the first months after deconversion. First, you need to sort out things for yourself (you don’t have a convincing success story yet). Second, by the law of reciprocation, if the other people were willing to listen to your explanations, this in turn gives them the moral right to give you a huge book of religious arguments and ask you to read it, which leads to the game described above.
Basicly, realize that you have a right to spend most of your time without thinking about Catholicism, either positively or negatively. That is what most atheists really do. If you were born on another planet, where religion wasn’t invented, you wouldn’t spend your time arguing against religion. Instead, you would just do what you want to do. So do it now.
This is known as cafeteria Catholicism. (I had only heard that used as an insult, but apparently there are people who self-identify as such.)
It reminds me of Transactional Analysis saying the best way to keep people in mental traps is to provide them two scripts: “this is what you should do if you are a good person”, but also “this is what you will do if you become a bad person (i.e. if you refuse the former script)”. So even if you decide to rebel, you usually rebel in the prescribed way, because you were taught to only consider these two options as opposites… while in reality there are many other options available.
The real challenge is to avoid both the “good script” and the “bad script”.
Thank you for the advice. I’ve started by rereading the scientific explanations of the big bang, evolution, and basically most general scientific principles. Looking at it without constant justification going on in my mind is quite refreshing.
So far I’ve been able to avoid most of the arguments, though I was surprised by how genuinely sad some people were. I’m going to keep quiet about religion for a while, and figure out what other pieces of my worldview I need to take a rational, honest look at.