I was raised in a Christian environment where the most important thing is going to heaven when you die, and to get to heaven you must believe rightly.
Romans 10:9 - "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
If I can trade 80 years of misery for an infinite number of years of happiness, that's a good deal. That's an infinitely good deal. So for the Christian, happiness in this life doesn't matter at all. And if death means I go to heaven, then why would I care about my survival? So for the Christian, survival and happiness do not matter. The only thing that matters is your salvation and your relationship with God. You live to maintain your salvation (suicide entails damnation for most Christians) and to live for God's purpose for you and to fulfill God's commands. Basically, you want to look as good as possible come judgment day.
Practically speaking, living as if a perfect being is judging your actions is a pretty good heuristic for living a life you can be proud of. Prayer as a form of 'moral introspection' is incredibly powerful and helpful as a tool of personal growth. Problems arise though when this introspection leads to self-deception (God wants me to do the thing that I happen to also want to do) or moral arrogance (pro-choice folks are pro-baby-murder because my tradition says so and I'm committed to my tradition).
While Christians try to separate themselves from the ways of the world, finding value in the virtue of being different, Christians ironically fall into all the same psychological traps of tribalism as everyone else. As biological creatures, of course Christians have an innate interest in survival. Survival requires integration into a power structure, which almost always involves integration into a social structure. As such, social success means survival for Christians. Christianity itself becomes a matter of social success. (This is clearly true of pastors who make their money from working at a church.)
So Christians rightly believe that happiness, survival, and social success can come apart from truth, and so they distance themselves from "the world" and the happiness, survival, and social success they may get from being "in the world." But ironically they just end up creating their own world. If "the world" is wrong, they are stuck in their wrong beliefs, because they depend on those beliefs for their survival. But if Christianity is wrong, Christians are stuck in their wrong beliefs for the same reason.
Being epistemically stuck is a severe intellectual vice. You can tell whether you are epistemically stuck by asking the question: If you were wrong, how would you discover this? If you say, "I cannot discover this," then you are stuck. You are not stuck (or less likely to be stuck) if your answer is: If I were wrong, I would discover this by 1) Being intellectually virtuous (especially, being willing to be wrong), 2) Reading opposing viewpoints and honestly and seriously engaging in them, 3) Talking to people who think differently than I do and keeping an open mind to what they have to say.
This is why someone's material reality can have a massive impact on their worldview. In fact, I would consider material independence to be an intellectual virtue. Anything that reduces bias is an intellectual virtue, and material independence reduces bias. If your survival doesn't depend on a particular worldview, then you won't be biased to hold onto that worldview. (If giving up a worldview entails that someone would die, then don't be surprised when they never give up that worldview even when it's false.)
Christians do not engage in opposing viewpoints. They assume they are right and carry on.
While I lost the Christianity, I kept the feeling that figuring out what I believe and why is what matters most. It's true that what happens after I die is of infinite importance, because it lasts forever. So I agree with the Christian that my happiness, success, and survival for 80 years is nothing compared to my happiness, success, and survival for an infinite number of years. So the question of whether Christianity is true is of infinite importance to me. And if Christianity is not true, then it's infinitely important to me to have certainty, or as close to certainty as possible, that this is the case. Basically, I should either do everything in my power to get into heaven when I die or to prove that heaven isn't real (or to prove that a fully rational person will, in the end, not believe in heaven). This covers my existential bases, as either I get into heaven, which is infinitely good, or I prove that there was never an infinite good in the first place (and thus, if I miss out on anything, I only miss out on finite goods).
Philosophy involves reading on your own, writing on your own, thinking on your own, and generally separating yourself from those systems that threaten your intellectual virtue. The Christian separates themselves from "the world," and the philosopher separates themselves from everything. (As mentioned though, philosophy at its best is collaborative, and it's this collaboration that's essential to preventing us from becoming epistemically stuck. However, while reading involves engaging in someone else's ideas, and is in that sense socially interactive, it's still a private practice free from the tribalistic mechanisms that emerge from social groups.)
Philosophy is a strange activity, one that most humans do not engage in on any serious level. This makes perfect sense, as humans engage in those activities that do impart survival and social success, and survival and social success have little to no connection (and even a reversed connection) to the practice of philosophy.
Again, if I consider what matters to not be the things of this life, but rather what comes next, then it makes sense that I would disregard the things of this life. It's exactly this disregard for survival and social success in pursuit of truth that makes philosophers strange, even inhuman. And yet, as I noted in a previous post, Aristotle said that our rationality is what makes us so distinctly human. And it's this inhuman-human paradox that makes philosophy a superhuman activity.
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