Unquestionably questioning

There is no greater barrier to our individual search to find truth than our own lack of efforts to perform the search in the first place.

Far too many people are trained to accept and memorize the things they are told. There is great credulity in the population in general, and very little in the way of skepticism or scrutiny of new ideas. People have found their belief systems, and they are comfortable and content in them, and feel little pressure to question whether those beliefs are accurate or not.

This is not just a religious phenomenon. It happens in politics - many of us are staunch Democrats and Republicans. It happens (and in this case often needs to happen) in warfare, where soldiers automatically obey orders from their chain of command.

But at the heart of the search to find truth are deep, hard questions. The reason science is so effective and useful to us is because it actively encourages such questions and rewards those who tear down former beliefs that prove, through questioning, to be false. On the matter of faith, consider that most of us are born into whatever faith we currently hold, and that whether your faith is right or not, if you have never changed your faith, is purely a matter of luck - you were either fortunate enough to be born correct, or (and this is statistically more likely) you were born into an incorrect faith.

I was decidedly fortunate. In not instilling any beliefs in me (or lack thereof), my parents left me with about as close to no preconcieved notions about faith as you can reasonably expect to have. So when I began to question, I suspect I did so from the best position for questioning - in this case, agnosticism, or rather the acknowledgement that we begin the search not knowing the answer.

This is a decidedly important stance to have when we ask questions. If we want to challenge and investigate our own beliefs, it becomes necessarily to suppress (for a time) those beliefs that we are questioning, or we will too easily arrive at the answer we wanted to find. To be objective, we have to let go of whatever answers we want to get, and let the answers we find guide us where they lead. Ask, and let the evidence or expirement answer you.

This is why an atheist should be willing to pray. We do not believe in God or the effectiveness of prayer, but we should make the attempt anyway simply because other people have put forth the idea that God will reveal himself to us if we pray for him to do so.

So we pray. We also, not infrequently, have people praying for us.

If the result surprises us - and God actually does reveal himself, then we should be willing to abide by that result. We then have more questions to ask.

Of course, if we still don't encounter God, then the theists have more questions to ask.


But the most dangerous thing is to stop questioning. The only way that can benefit you is if you already have the truth. If you don't already have it, then it is only by questioning that you can possibly recognize the truth when it is finally presented to you. If you DO already have the truth, then the truth should be able to withstand rigorous scrutiny and hard questions, and questioning it will only help you learn more about it.