The rabbit hole of belief

[GliderGuider]

If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth , and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defence of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. -- Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea)

Organized religion is in fact one of the easiest beliefs to get rid of - it's so obviously WTF? However, the rest of them take more work.

I started down the rabbit hole, discarding my beliefs one by one, about a decade ago. I had a head start because I was born an atheist. But there was still more work to do than I realized...

First I stopped believing what governments, history books and authority figures of all kinds said about what happened, and why, and who the heroes and villains were.

Next to go were all those cultural and social beliefs about myself and others that I had learned since I was about 3 years old.

Next went the belief that my sensory perceptions and mental reasoning were telling me some semblance of "the truth".

Then out the door went the belief in opposing values - good/bad, right/wrong, better/worse etc.

About this time I discovered Pyrrhonian skepticism, and realized that ALL beliefs were unsupportable.

Then Advaita showed me that even my sense of self was a constructed illusion, and the belief that there is something called "me" a universe "out there" that is somehow independent from me vanished like a soap bubble. All that was left to believe in was an abstract universal Consciousness.

Now I've realized that even the existence of an abstract Consciousness is just another story the illusory self tells whoever will listen.

Whatever Reality actually is, is not knowable, let alone believable.

So, down here at the bottom of the rabbit hole of belief there is ... absolutely nothing.

And yet life goes on. Or so I believe...