Atheist & Believer; The Great God Om; A Thought-Experiment about Reading

A reflection on where the theme of religious belief is heading in Quibble, with a further note on Pratchett's Small Gods and a personal reflection on a "what-if."

Atheist & Believer

Starting in chapter 13, “Faith,” I’m pairing Quibble and Alnasl in order to explore some ideas about religion. As Pratchett’s does in Small Gods (see my first reflection), my treatment will hinge on reversals.

Quibble, One gone Without by her own request, has forsaken her people’s religion. She’s taken up in its place a personal religion, of a sort, centered on a belief about how people will remember her once she’s gone. Otherwise, she’s progressed quickly from heresy to an atheistic apostasy which suggests a moral system without spelling it out.

Alnasl is a vision, the adept (think “journeyman” in the medieval guild hierarchy) of the silence Aladfar. The Zeros’ religion is closely intertwined with the Ones’ religion, and silences, who rectify Ones, are the closest thing Zeros have to priests. As a vision, Alnasl is a master in the use of glasses, and this mastery entails religious belief, even mysticism. What’s more, Alnasl has something the real-world religious do not have: actual, tangible evidence for the validity of his beliefs which stands up to scrutiny. He has oodles of proof, in fact.

What’s not clear at all to Quibble, yet, is Alnasl’s moral system.

Alnasl will teach Quibble a lot about glasses, so of course they’ll butt heads regarding ideas about that. But a more significant conflict between them will arise from beliefs one has and the other hasn’t, going both ways.

By “reversals,” though, I don’t mean to suggest Quibble will eventually adopt religious belief or Alnasl will lose his, simple as that. To me, that sounds like a boring story. It misapprehends the questions I want to explore.

Quiddity asserts, “We believe what convinces us.” I’m not a philosopher and don’t know all the fine points that can be argued about this assertion. I basically agree with it and take it as axiomatic.

But this isn’t to say conviction instantly justifies a belief. In my life, typically I slip into errors of belief when, for an emotional reason, I stop caring about truth and thus about what would actually convince me. It happens like this:

Accepting a belief promises to fulfill an emotional need — comfort or belonging, for instance. Also, the belief seems intuitively true as long as I don’t entertain certain questions or doubts. So, to satisfy my emotional need, I forgo scrutinizing the belief beyond the point at which grave doubts begin to rear their heads. Based on emotion and intuition and not much else, I settle into a false conviction about the belief. I’m “convinced” of it, but only because I’m propping it up with willful ignorance. I’m deceiving myself. If I’d only take a hard, honest look in the mirror…

Once I accept a belief without scrutiny and the sky doesn’t fall on my head, it’s easier to accept the next belief without scrutiny.

If I accept the first in a series of beliefs this way — with the encouragement of other people, of course — I’ll probably have to accept the next belief those people ask me to accept without scrutiny. If I don’t, and if I admit to myself why I don’t, and if I care at all about consistency in my beliefs, then I must ask myself, “Is my reason for rejecting this belief a good reason to reexamine any of the beliefs I’ve previously accepted?”

Religion presents us with this choice: we can accept endless beliefs on faith, or we can tug at the yarn of previously accepted beliefs, the acceptance of which has afforded us the benefits of acceptance and belonging. We’re only human, of course. The emotional needs religion fulfills for us are great. And, in many cases, religion even manufactures emotions and needs for us — for instance, emotions of shame and guilt, the need to be absolved of what the religion calls “sin” (a most suspect category: many so-called sins are only things the religion has proscribed, not things plainly immoral on their faces). As we’re caught up in this matrix of basic and manufactured emotional needs, doesn’t it become tempting to indulge the sunk-cost fallacy — “I’ve come this far” — and just plunge forward, ever deeper into false convictions about poorly examined beliefs?

Proportional to the emotional needs that religion answers for us, then, is the peril to our standards for what actually convinces us.

This pitfall in religious belief is no slight matter. I’ll explore it with a few characters. At some distance from Quibble, Vega and Aladfar will wrestle with it. But since he’s so close to Quibble, we’ll see Alnasl’s struggle with it clearest.

In Quibble herself, we find a skeptical mind, a person who plays if, then with herself a lot. As Alnasl will discover, it’s hard to convince her of anything. A stubborn stickler for truth — someone who’ll quibble until the cows come home — may not be an easy target for religious conversion, but such a trait presents her with other pitfalls. One is ego: once you reject a belief, it’s easy to scoff at people who hold it, to think of them as weak-minded. Another, ironically, is difficulty making decisions, a lack of resolve.

And what if Quibble is given convincing reasons to believe and disbelieve the same things, to trust and mistrust the same people? And competing emotional needs?

That, dear reader, is where I’ll attempt reversals.

The Great God Om

— who’s, you know, a tortoise with a short supply of stoicism — undergoes his own troublesome reversals in Small Gods.

I’m not going off on a tangent about this, at least not now. But I just want to mention in passing that what Pratchett does with Om is as interesting and innovative as the dichotomy of Brutha and Vorbis. Pratchett uses Om to deconstruct religion from the viewpoint of a god.

How does he pull that off? I leave this to your imagination and investigation.

A Thought-Experiment about Reading

Today, a meme popped up in a book group I follow on Facebook: