Challenge to Christian Belief: From Psychology, Personality, and Aesthetics

Anyone who understands human psychology knows there is no "one-size fits all" model for... just about anything. There is no one house that all humans would enjoy living in. There is no one style of clothing all humans would want to wear. There is no one diet that all humans would want to eat. And so on.

This applies to every single facet of human life. This especially applies to personality, aesthetics, and taste. We cannot help but like the things we like, to be attracted to the things we are attracted to, and to be compelled by what we find compelling. Different shapes and colors appeal to different people. Different sounds and genres of music appeal to different people. One person loves an outfit, another person hates it. One person loves a song, another person hates it. One person loves a movie, another person hates it. And that's okay. Different things fit better or worse with other things. Beauty and aesthetics involve, maybe more than thing, cohesion. Cohesion and aptness. There are also connections between aesthetics and truth, function, and usefulness. Things can be beautiful because they are rich and complex. Things can be beautiful because they are simple and efficient. Style and taste is all about being able to recognize what fits with what, with how cohesive, apt, or appropriate things are. A provocative outfit might be in order for a red carpet photo shoot. That same outfit would be a crime at a funeral. A song about nostalgia should sound dissonant and sweet, capturing the ambivalent bittersweetness of the feeling. If someone composed a song, called it Nostalgia, and it was funky jazz pop or angsty screamo metal, we would naturally be confused.

Christianity is one religion. Christianity demands a one-size fits all. Even worse, per Christians, you're not allowed to choose a denomination; each denomination insists that they are the exact right one and all the others are deeply mistaken. So God, being all-wise and knowing how human psychology works, and understands how aesthetically- and personality-driven humans are, knows that by setting up a One True Religion he is excluding millions if not billions of humans purely on the basis of psychology, personality, and aesthetics, which are things we cannot control.

The Christian will protest: Of course the truth is a "one-size fits all." It's the truth after all.

But this is missing the point. Badly. Religion is very aesthetically driven, because religion is, well, mythology, and mythology is related to fiction, and fiction is aesthetic. Whereas fictions are explicitly imaginary, mythologies are "accidental fictions," meaning imagination-based speculations on the way things really work. The difference between mythology and fiction is that people really believe in the former, but not the latter.

But the boundary between mythology and fiction gets fuzzy when it comes to ritual, performance, and the backdrop of scientific knowledge. If mythologies and fictions reveal metaphorical truths that we believe in, then in some sense there is belief in the myth.

We enjoy the aesthetics of Arthurian legends, of Norse mythology, of Greek and Roman mythology, and of Egyptian and Asian mythologies. Christianity and Islam can be very aesthetically satisfying as well, with their grand battles between angels and demons, like Michael versus Satan, with striking imagery like the burning sword at the Garden of Eden. Our fictions constantly borrow from myths.

Lord of the Rings takes the aesthetics of Christianity and the aesthetics of Celtic druidism and fashions a kind of Christian paganism. Gandalf dies and rises again, more powerful than ever, like Jesus. And Lord of the Rings is very aesthetically compelling to a lot of people. It's a good blend. But some people feel disconnected to it, and that's fine. Star Wars achieved something similar by combining samurai, Buddhist, and Christian concepts using the Force and the Dark Side versus the Light Side. (I just realized that Gandalf is the same character as Obi-wan Kenobi! They are both wise wizards that set the main character on their journey only to die and come back later in a more powerful form. Is that a coincidence, or...?)

If God were truly wise, then, he would give us a true substructure, which can be grounded in science, philosophy, logic, history, and all the bits about objective truth. Those things tend to be aesthetically lacking, and lacking in terms of helping us find our personalities, styles, and which communities we best fit in.

I think it's not a coincidence that astrological signs are so popular. People desperately need personality tests. It gives us a way to categorize people and to adjust our expectations of their behavior, and how well they will be compatible with us. Given our social nature, social success is a precious commodity, and social failure, loneliness, and the inability to connect to others is a dreadful problem. Anything that aids us in achieving social success, and avoiding social failure, is a precious tool, and personality tests are an essential part of that. Astrological signs are not accurate. Myers-Briggs, from what I hear, is not accurate either. The problem is that personality systems tend to massively oversimplify things. But trying to develop more accurate personality systems requires increasing their complexity, which makes them more difficult to communicate, which defeats their purpose of being able to quickly and easily communicate social expectations. I bet Myers-Briggs is more accurate than astrology, but it's less popular perhaps for aesthetic reasons.

If God wanted to truly wow me with his wisdom, he would have set things out by creating the optimal personality system that balances simplicity and aesthetics with accuracy and comprehensiveness. Then, God would give us many different religions to choose from corresponding to those personality types. This would achieve a beautiful balance between individualism and collectivism. Overemphasize collectivism and you end up with conformity, homogeneity, a lack of creativity and self-expression, an aesthetic dullness, the excruciating death of the individual, and the destruction of originality and novelty. Overemphasize individualism and you have division, instability, the fracturing of community, the loss of a sense of unity, and a lonely, every-man-for-himself, empty, meaningless life. There is an aesthetic loss too, as all the responsibility to find an aesthetic, and to find one's path, is placed entirely on the individual, and there is a loss of a shared aesthetic which brings warmth and a sense of belonging.

By giving us an optimal personality test, and an optimal list of religions to choose from, God would achieve that balance between the individual and the collective. On the individual side, we would have known and communicable personality types, and we would have a choice as to which religion we fit best with according to that personality. Religions could be divided according to which types work best with each other, ensuring optimal social success and sense of belonging for each member. We enjoy the feeling of belonging and being a part of something bigger than ourselves, and of participating in a shared aesthetic and shared way of life by joining the religion of our choice.

The religions would differ in their mythologies and aesthetics and lifestyles, but they would not differ in their adherence to the truth. The mythologies are surface structures that exist on top of the deeper structure. Just as religions currently co-exist with science, logic, and philosophy, these religions would too exist with these things. So all religions would share in the objective truth of things. But science, logic, and philosophy give us basically nothing in terms of community, personality, and aesthetics. That's where mythology and religion come in and provide these deep-seated psychological needs. These myths, as ritualized fictions, would be entirely compatible with objective truth, as they would be understood by all inhabitants as entered fictions. (The work of Kathleen Stock might be relevant here, as she has written on fiction and on the usefulness and necessity of participating in fictions.) This is really no different than what we already do in fandoms. Fans of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and so on, often write fan-fiction and participate in these imaginary worlds. These are deeply creatively and aesthetically satisfying experiences. Some of my favorite gaming experiences have been playing Star Wars games like Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight games. So aesthetic! And some of my most powerful aesthetic experiences have come from playing classic World of Warcraft, a game so powerful and compelling that it was brought back in 2019, fifteen years after its release. I played it in 2005, 2006, starting at the age of ten. Imagine playing a game that powerful at that young of an age! It was mindblowing. Playing these games and exploring these worlds is an aesthetic, quasi-religious participation of its own, especially when gamers play together or bond over their shared experiences. It's difficult for me to separate out these kinds of powerful aesthetic, social, shared gaming experiences with the religious experiences of Christianity and church.

And yet God doesn't give us any of this. Instead, we get a single religion: Christianity, and we are demanded to contort ourselves and throw away our psychologies, individualities, personalities, and aesthetic preferences, and conform to a homogeneous system. There are so many problems with this! First, Christians are not remotely on the same page as to where Christianity mythology begins and ends, and to what extent exactly it's supposed to be myth versus something like science, history, or philosophy. So there is a gross "muddiness" to Christian belief. Some Christians believe that Genesis 1–11 is literal history and that denying this excludes you from the group. Other Christians believe Genesis 1–11 is basically myth, largely borrowed from Ancient Near-Eastern creations myths around at the time. There is no absolute canon, either of scripture or doctrine. There is too much division. Catholics complain about how ugly Protestant churches are, which Protestants find hilarious, as they find Catholic doctrines to be hideous and they see the beauty in doctrine and community as being a much higher priority than something as shallow and unimportant as buildings. The truth is that the beauty of the teachings, lifestyles, and yes, the buildings, all matter. We should be free to choose different options according to our personalities, and inevitably that is exactly what humans do because that is exactly how human psychology works, and apparently God is clueless as to how human psychology works.

But if religion is man-made, then we would expect exactly the chaos and disorder that we see. There is no fine-tuning for human lifestyles, for human psychology, personality, or aesthetics. If there were fine-tuning of that sort, that would be extremely powerful evidence of God. But as is, things are exactly how we would expect them to be if there were no God wise in the ways of human psychology.

Gavin Ortlund on what we lose when we lose God

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-nHx7GBGA

3:20 - 4:00

"Let's suppose there is no God. It is hard to state how dark that is. What it means for our human nature, for love, for the way that I feel about my kids – so that's one of the most important things in my life, that feeling of love I have for them. If that's reductively explained by evolutionary psychology – basically I feel this way because it helped animals survive in my animal ancestry, and that's it, and there's nothing more – if I really try to live on that basis, I do find it dehumanizing. It tears away everything that I think gives life value and meaning, and hope."

It cannot possibly be dehumanizing to find out the true nature of humans. It would be the opposite; it would be a humanization of your views about yourself to find out what it really means to be human. Really, it's Christianity that dehumanizes us and makes us out to be these 'kingly creatures' or godly spiritual beings with immortal souls – made in the 'image of God' and loved by God to the point of incarnation, sacrifice, and salvation.

Clearly, Ortlund had in mind something other than the literal meaning of dehumanizing – something more along the lines of what he says next. If there is no God and we are mere flukes of nature – the result of particles smashing together in surprisingly productive ways – then there's no real reason for our existence. We are because we can be and that's simply how the dice came up; or, in the case of necessitarianism, we are because we must be as determined by the necessary laws of nature.

In one sense I'm in full agreement with Gavin Ortlund. I think we lose a lot when we lose God; in some sense losing God is an infinite loss, or at least an infinite disappointment. I think God entails that the universe is in the best possible state of affairs, or at least in one possible configuration of a best possible state of affairs. Hence, why I defend pro-theism. The world would be so much more meaningful and beautiful if death wasn't the end, but we went on to enjoy a world where nature and humanity are in perfect harmony, where we can explore galaxies and build worlds of our own. We can imagine a world infinitely better than ours, and it's pretty crushing to start with a worldview in which everything is enchanted by God's purpose and adoration only to come to believe that death is the end and we are just another bug crawling around on a speck of dust floating in a cosmic sea of indifference. We are not kingly creatures, but machines obeying complex lines of code that so happen to include the curse of subjective consciousness.

Reality is hellish compared to what we can imagine. Gavin is right – that's dark. But it's a darkness we must face. Hiding from it doesn't make it go away.

While the naturalistic worldview invites deep cynicism and pessimism, I don't think it entails the extreme version where humans are objectively worthless and all value is subjective. On that view, anthropocide isn't wrong in any real sense; destroying all of humanity wouldn't make any real difference. That's a degree of cynicism too extreme for me. I think that view fails to appreciate the reality of value.

In another post, I'll defend my view of mitigated cynicism. We should be cynical up to a point, but I argue that human value is immense, finite, and objective. Human value is not infinite like the idealists and Christians believe or want to believe. And human value is not nothing as the cynics think. And human value is not subjective like the anti-realists say. But that's for another time.

Philosophy Stream of Consciousness - Truth, Power, and Human Nature

Part I: The Right Kind of Person

The right kind of person is the person who cares about truth and cares about being a good person. The person who cares about truth is the same person who cares about being good, and vice versa. Both reduce to the same desire to be reconciled to reality. This desire is the love of God. When I say I love God, I mean that I feel an overwhelming desire to be reconciled to reality. Christians are familiar with this weight of getting right with God. For the Christian, to lack a love for God is to lack the desire to be reconciled to reality, and thus to fail to be the right kind of person. (A lack of love for God coincides with the sin of pride, the failure to humble yourself by acknowledging that you need reconciliation.) The fear of God is the fear of what happens when you fail to be the right kind of person. The love of wisdom is the love of that which reconciles you to God. You cannot love that which reconciles you to God unless you first fear what happens when you fail to be so reconciled. This is why the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the practice of reconciling oneself to reality. This practice consists in reading, writing, thinking, and wrestling with the deepest and most important questions humans can wrestle with. Ultimately, this practice involves killing the parts of you that are out of step with reality. Philosophy is a highly personal project that looks different for everyone brave enough to embark on a truth-seeking journey.

It might sound strange for me to say I love God when I’ve lost faith. But we can still invoke God metaphorically, poetically, emotionally, or rhetorically when we need to. For me, loving God refers to a collection of ideas; one is a running away from that terrible feeling of being out of step with reality, a feeling that has always haunted me; another is that Stoic resolution and acceptance of life come what may – that Nietzschean embrace of reality despite its horrors. To love God is to love life and death and everything in between, to celebrate agony for its realness, and to mourn agony for its evil all the same.

Part II: Intellectual Virtue

The person who cares about truth will possess intellectual virtues. It is no surprise that the person who cares about intellectual virtue would be the kind of person to care about virtue more generally; so again, caring about truth and caring about morality go hand-in-hand. The right kind of person is the person who possesses virtue, both intellectual and general.

If you care about truth, you will have a passion for truth.

You will be humble, admitting that you do not already have all the answers.

You will be honest about what exactly you believe and exactly why you believe it.

You will be brave about pursuing the truth, willing to undergo that painful process of changing one’s mind, even giving up your deepest sense of yourself, in the event that your most cherished beliefs turn out false.

You will be disciplined, not generalizing in a hasty manner or jumping to conclusions. You will put in the work needed to become well-informed in your beliefs, always testing your theories for weaknesses.

You will be empathetic to those who hold different views from yours, and seek first to understand competing theories before trying to tear them down, steelmanning rather than strawmanning, building up opposing views to their strongest version so that defeating them is as meaningful as possible. Who knows, maybe in your practice of building up competing theories you will realize that the view you were prepared to argue against is really the better view.

You will be kind when discussing these matters with others, never engaging in character attacks or expressions of hatred, judgment, or blame. Instead you will demonstrate patience, understanding, and gentile correction, always seeking to highlight the insights of others, always seeking your own correction – always celebrating the joy of philosophy and inspiring that joy in others.

Part III: Truth and Power Come Apart

You will notice that most people are not intellectually virtuous. This is not their fault. Where would they get the idea of intellectual virtue from? It’s not taught to us by our parents, or in school, or in media or entertainment or even college.

The only reason why I know about it is thanks to the internet, which exposed me to certain books and videos that discuss these things. (To give myself some credit, I did come up with the "signs of the truthseeker" in college; though even that was thanks to a helpful professor's nudging me in the right direction. It was later that I discovered these "signs" have a name: virtues.) I did not learn these things from my community or culture or education.

However, growing up Christian, I did inherit the attitude that what you believe is what matters most. For the Christian, believing in the truth is the most important thing, a matter of life and death – even more than that, a matter of salvation and damnation. Though I have lost my faith, I cannot shake the habit of viewing true belief as the most important thing. Say what you will about Christianity, it did give me my passion for truth, and from that the rest followed. Christianity, in this way, provides the tools for its own destruction. Christianity demands us to take it seriously, but when we do we discover challenges to Christian belief that render it impossible to be Christian.

So we cannot fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous, because one must be taught intellectual virtue or to have the right kind of inputs that cause someone to become intellectually virtuous, and most never get a chance to be taught it or to be exposed to those inputs. Speaking of inputs, another reason why we can’t fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous is because they are not paid to be intellectually virtuous. Very few jobs require intellectual virtue or build up one's intellectual virtue by working that job.

People go where the money is, and culture is shaped by that which makes money. People admire and respect that which survives, and they take pity on that which doesn’t. Philosophy doesn’t make money, and so it is to be pitied by ordinary folks. If a high-effort activity doesn’t make money, then it’s not worth it, says our culture. They are correct. If at the end of the day you cannot pay your bills and survive, then what’s the point? Poverty causes great misery. No amount of virtue is worth misery, our culture has spoken. Or rather, you can’t be virtuous when you’re dead. So survival is the more urgent need.

If people go where the money is, and there is no money in virtue, then people will naturally end up away from virtue. That’s how you end up with a rotten culture. And yet, this is all necessary, because society is shaped by the most common and powerful biological pressures. Food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, social pressures, and so on, are the common needs and the most urgent pressures. There is little if any biological pressure to be a virtuous person, especially when being virtuous entails going against the values of your community – the very people who help you survive. Being anti-racist, though a virtue, would be socially costly in the Antebellum South.

If you wish to shape culture in a certain way, then you must implement survival pressures to create that shape. If people received money from the government or tax breaks by passing a yearly BMI test, then people would be more motivated to maintain a healthy weight. If you want people to be a certain way, pay them to be that way. If you want people to not be a certain way, then pay them to be something else.

Power validates things, and the most fundamental power is to exist and to keep existing. Imagine an invincible human who could not die, and could teleport anywhere he wanted to. He could not be captured or killed. He could criticize Russia in Russia, and instead of disappearing instantly like the others, he would remain. He could go against the wealthy elites of the world without ending up dead. His existence would become like a law of nature, with everyone forced to live with him and to look upon him. While dead men are forgotten, the invincible man who speaks truth to power would be impossible to ignore.

There is only a tenuous connection between virtue and survival, and between vice and death. Often, the connections are reversed, with virtue leading to failure and vice leading to success. This is why CEOs and kings and emperors are tyrants and dictators – ruthless, evil, insane. "When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die." Virtue has everything to do with being a good person, but little to do with being a person who survives. Was it virtue that enabled the man to become a model? It was his looks. Was it kindness that landed the actor a million dollar role? It was her skill. It doesn’t matter how good of a person you are; if you sing off-key, they boo you off the stage. There is a deep meanness to life because survival itself is mean. Death is mean. So of course there will be a meanness to power structures; of course the most powerful people will be, in general, the most evil.

The problem of injustice is exactly this problem of the disconnection between truth and power. When a man is sentenced to prison on a false conviction, does his knowledge of the truth have any power? Or when the Armenians were attacked by the Ottomans, did their sheer desire to escape violence stop the attack? Did their sheer certainty in the wrongness of the genocide have any effect?

Wanting something has no necessary connection to obtaining it, no matter how virtuous the desire or how better off the world would be. And wanting something has no necessary connection to preventing you from obtaining it, no matter how vicious the desire or how worse off the world would be.

The government then, as the enforcer of the social contract and the upholder of justice, is meant to play the role of that connection. The government must act like a predator introduced to an ecosystem to cull the population of a vermin, in this case greed, corruption, and vice. Ideally, laws would enable the good and rational to get what they want while the evil and irrational do not. 

Unfortunately, the government itself is governed by survival pressures, and so conflict of interest is built in. The laws are made and sustained by those in power, and so naturally the laws serve the powerful. And if power and truth naturally come apart, then there is no necessary connection between laws and justice. Nothing could be more obvious than that – how often do we see states commit atrocities? But then this means the government can never fulfill the role of providing the connection between virtue and power needed to ensure justice. Injustice is as much a built-in feature of life as gravity or entropy.

Notice that God also does not provide that connection in this life. Losing faith involves losing, among other things, that optimism that comes with the belief that justice is built into things with God in control. Without God setting things straight in the end, the injustices of this world are in a sense permanent, replacing our optimism with pessimism. This is one reason why pro-theism (the view that we ought to want God to exist) is obviously true. If God wants to fix the sinfulness of the world (as he apparently did when he sent the flood), all he has to do is establish that connection between virtue and power (and vice and weakness) and overnight the world would turn into a heavenly place.

Part IV: Social Structures are Power Structures

Humans are biologically contextualized creatures. Non-human animals are not interested in seeking truth beyond survival, and humans are not categorically different from the other animals. In the face of suffering and death, humans and the other animals share the same interests. Humans are very interested in not suffering and in not dying.

So it's no surprise that just as the non-human animals are more interested in survival than truth, humans too are forced to be more interested in survival than truth. Philosophy then is the most inhuman activity, as it's an activity that disregards survival and pursues truth. And yet, in another sense it's the most human activity, because, as Aristotle would say, exercising our rationality is what makes humans unique among animals. Because humans should always strive to evolve, they should always look for that activity which is both totally human and totally inhuman, as that is an activity that is at the edge of humanity. These activities are superhuman, and it is by engaging in them that we stand a chance in going beyond the limitations of our present species.

As biological creatures, humans reproduce sexually. Sexuality itself is a survival structure (the human race goes extinct without it), and sexuality is social in nature (it takes two to tango). Humans are forced to come together to keep the human race going. And it's just as well, because co-operation is essential to human survival anyway. So social structures are survival structures because 1) Humanity relies on sexuality for its survival, and 2) Individual humans rely on their communities for access to resources.

Social success is a matter of life and death, which is why we have evolved to find humiliation (social failure) to be one of the most painful feelings. Social pressures become immensely influential on us, because resisting social pressure risks humiliation. 

If power and truth comes apart (one can have truth but lack power), and social structures are power structures, then the social way of being comes apart from the truthseeking way of being (being a genuine truthseeker does not guarantee social success and can even entail social failure).

As we've already discussed, speaking truth to power can get you killed, or at least harassed, bullied, mocked, labeled a heretic, ostracized, excommunicated, disfellowshipped, and so on. While it's painfully obvious to us now how stupid and evil racism is, there have been cultural settings where being anti-racist would have meant your social failure. If you can convince a group of people that something is weird, then you can turn them all against it no matter how good that thing is. In a world where being normal is the greatest virtue, being normal and evil is better than being weird and good. Being a Nazi was normal in Nazi Germany, and opposing Nazism was weird.

I have told this story but I'll reproduce it here briefly. At a Bible study a long time ago I asked the following question: Does prayer change the mind of God? If not, why pray? If yes, then is God's mind in need of changing? I was hoping for a rich theological discussion to follow. Instead all that followed was awkward silence, and I was quickly made to feel unwelcome in the group.

In a church setting, it is weird to challenge Christianity. But is it wrong, or evil, or stupid? No. It's right, virtuous, and smart to ask those kinds of questions. But that rightness, virtuousness, and intelligence didn't prevent social failure. More broadly, being a genuine truthseeker is weird. People go where the money is, and there is, usually, no money in being a genuine truthseeker. People go where social success is, and there is, usually, no social success in being a genuine truthseeker. This is why it's not a coincidence that philosophers have a poor reputation as far as their social affinity is concerned.

But as the quote goes, attributed to J. Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

For the truthseeker, no amount of social success is worth the cost if the cost is believing in truth. This is the archetype of the martyr, to pursue truth even in the face of persecution.

The observation that society is woefully (but understandably) lacking in intellectual virtue brings us to an important ingredient to the understanding of human nature: the surface layer vs the deep layer.

The surface layer is of heuristics while the deep layer is of understanding. The surface layer is fast, the deep layer is slow. The surface layer represents simplicity, survival, feeling, impulsivity, first impressions, knee-jerk, instant gratification, basic needs, socializing, outsourcing your worldview to others, and so on. The deep layer represents complexity, truthseeking, thinking, calculation, deliberation, investigation, delayed gratification, higher-order needs, introspection, soul-searching, thinking for yourself, and so on. The surface is the what, the deep is the why. I may know how to use a mathematical formula, but do I understand why the formula works?

A great deal of society exists on the surface. Most people most of the time live on the surface, because this is the layer of survival, and because a great deal of the population is young, and younger people, especially kids and teenagers, are most likely to live on the surface most of the time. We may think of these as ways of being. Humans, as they develop their critical thinking skills and abilities, gain access into the deep way of being. It’s not accurate to think humans are always in one way of being or another. Humans can drift in and out between the layers throughout the days and years of their life. Even children can have moments of insight, and adults can fail to think for themselves.

An example of this concept playing out in real life is with trolling. Trolling exploits the surface layer for one's own amusement. To troll is to say something or do something as a way to test people and elicit a funny, exaggerated response. For example, "Islam is right about women." On the surface layer, this is a vaguely racist remark. But on the deep layer, it's a dilemma. Either you admit Islam is wrong about something – a violation of our multicultural beliefs – or you admit regressive views about women, which is misogynistic.

Those on the surface have a knee-jerk, emotional, antagonistic reaction. They have not researched or put any real thought into what Islam teaches about women. You could do the same with "Islam is right about gay people." Again, the "surface-dweller" has to choose between their values of multiculturalism and pro-LGBTQ.

If you say "Islam is false" at the wrong time, with the wrong people, you will receive nasty looks. Ironically, those nasty looks will come from people, probably white women, who are themselves not Muslim. They are living on the surface, which is the layer of social stability. Saying things like “Islam is false” is not conducive to social stability. Acts of social instability are met with social punishment, even when they are virtuous and accurate. Is it inaccurate to say Islam is false? No. Is it important for us to be able to have a mature conversation about the truth of Islam? Yes. Can we have that conversation? Maybe not. Maybe the social pressure to avoid certain topics is too strong. Repeat for other controversial topics.

The truthseeker does not admire this burying of one's head in the sand. She admires those who bravely tackle difficult, important topics, and who bring kindness, sophistication, nuance, and the indisputable tools of reason to bear on them.

People say that politicians are all liars – politicians dodge questions in a dishonest way. But politicians are doing what normal people do every day—navigating social situations in a strategic way—just on a bigger scale. Everyone masks. Carl Jung wrote about the persona and the shadow. The persona is the mask, the facade, the front-facing shield that gives one access to the surface layer and allows one to achieve social success. The shadow is composed of those parts of you that are hidden to avoid social failure. Some parts of you are truly bad and should be burned away, but other parts are neutral or good that are suppressed purely because of social risk. Integrating the shadow is that process of discerning the unhealthy and healthy shadows, starving the unhealthy parts while strategically bringing the healthy parts up into the persona at the right time. Ideally, a balance is achieved between authenticity and social success. In some cases, like the gay rights movement, an acceptable degree of both authenticity and social success is only possible for a group after a great deal of effort is made to reform society.

End

Life, just like a conversation, has a flow to it. You must let go of yourself and go with the flow. When the universe sends you a message, you must listen to it. Don’t be like Jonah who ran away from Nineveh. We must be like Nietzsche who promoted amor fati, the love of fate – the radical resignation to the Real – we must be like Jesus who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Not my will, but yours be done" – we must go to Nineveh, to Golgotha, even if it means going to our death. The love of truth entails giving up all that’s false, even if that means giving up what we want most. Only the one who loses his life finds it (Matthew 10:39), and only the one who hates his life can follow the truth (Luke 14:26). When truth and survival come apart, the disciple of truth disregards survival, and thus disregards their own self. When Truth calls a man, she bids him come and die. Only then is he ready for reconciliation.