Unlearning all the faulty logic and pseudoscience I’d learned while Christian was tough, but I had a much tougher time with unlearning how I’d learned how to learn.

Christianity gave me a framework that I used to evaluate ideas and approach the issues of my day. That framework formed the foundation of how I went about figuring stuff out. I saw everything in terms of how it fit into my faith and how I should respond to it as a Christian. Even as I moved from one denomination to the next, and long after leaving Christianity entirely, I clung stubbornly to some of the vestiges of that basic framework.

The framework had a lot of components, all working together more or less smoothly to keep me from engaging with the real world. It almost kept me from leaving the religion. It’s that powerful. It not only colored what information I was getting, but made it even possible to see that information–or not to see it at all. That’s why tearing it in half was so difficult–but so necessary.

Here are some components of the framework I was operating with.

(I’m just going to note these ideas in passing here, because we’re going to be looking at them in great detail over the next few posts, barring our customary brief distractions.)

* Thinking that “there are other ways of knowing.”

I learned from my earliest years to think that there was some other magical way for something to be objectively factual without actually being credibly verifiable by measurement or senses. No. There is not. There’s just one way of knowing, and that’s to know. Other than that, there are ways of wishful thinking, but that’s not the same thing. As AronRa on YouTube points out, if you can’t show it, you don’t actually know it. But clinging to this false idea was all that had made Christianity even possible and it enabled me to keep believing in magical ideas and being after deconverting, so it was difficult to perceive, let alone challenge.

* Living in “ought” rather than “is.”

Instead of basing my opinions on how people operate in the real world, I should, I thought at the time, favor social policies that totally refused to take reality into account. I’ve seen a lot of Christians do that. They’ll hold certain stances because they think than an ideal person or society should hold those stances, and sometimes even vote for or work to make those stances become law (or at least moral imperatives) even though our very real society has demonstrated that it categorically can’t do that without multiplying misery upon those affected. The idea I had that we should do these things took precedence over the damage and heartache those stances would cause if actually made binding upon real people–and then I had to create all the escape clauses and “get out of X free” cards necessary to make those stances even halfway palatable to anybody with half a sense of compassion. At least it kept me busy!

* Having a certain inability to recognize whether or not an “expert’s” credentials are legitimate.

Anybody who’s laughed his or her way through convicted tax scammer Kent Hovind’s utterly awful “dissertation” (which begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind”) knows that pretty much anybody can assume the mantle of expertise in Christianity. Diploma mills like the kangaroo court that gave Mr. Hovind his laughably inept degree are only part of the problem. Sometimes Christians will actually have a degree or some kind of training–just in something totally different than the topic at hand, like this guy who is basically a lab technician passing himself off as a scientist, or the various big-name preachers totally lacking psychological training who nonetheless keep giving psychological advice to people. People who actually have reputable educations and are speaking about their actual areas of expertise get drowned out by hordes of ear-tickling “experts” who only confuse Christians more by making them feel certain about nonsense.

* Possessing no foundation at all in critical thinking.

I knew my share of philosophy majors in college, but generally speaking my peers didn’t trust the discipline a whole lot. (Sorry, Dan! I’m better now!) We saw it as something that would only confuse Christians and lead them astray, and the generally weird behavior and speech of those philosophy majors we knew only reinforced that opinion. I didn’t have the faintest idea what a logical fallacy even was when I was Christian, much less know what such fallacies did to the favorite apologetics arguments of my day. Weirdly, strangely, perplexingly, critical thinking skills just weren’t taught or emphasized at any point in my entire childhood or young adulthood.

* Thinking I could teach myself anything I really needed to know and do it on par with formal education.

Call this one the Good Will Hunting Effect, or blame it on Americans’ eagerness to believe that any fool can teach him- or herself particle physics and statistics and be the equal of all the formally-trained experts in the world. There was already a distinct anti-education bias going around when I was Christian and I see that bias getting worse and worse when I survey Christianity as a whole today. I sincerely believed that I could read popular books about history, theology, or science and come out of it knowing more than trained historians, seminarians, and scientists–and moreover that I could give these (likely atheist! gasp!) folks a run for their money. Because I didn’t realize back then what goes into the formal educations of those fields and others like them, because I had no background at all in the rigorous methodology they have to know, of necessity my conclusions were going to be weak if not hilariously wrong. About the best thing I can say, when I run into these homegrown historians, scientists, and theologians is “bless their little hearts, they’re trying so hard.” But I ain’t on my high horse here: I know exactly how seductive this thinking is.

* Getting the order of operations wrong when it came to forming opinions.

In the real world nowadays, I look at facts and what we know before I form an opinion–or at least allow myself to view even competing information in case my opinions are wrong. Doing this has led me to some surprising places. When I was Christian, I started with the assumption that the Bible was real, that Jesus was a real live god, that Christianity’s claims were true, and that my various political and social stances were the morally correct ones to take–and I sought (and perceived) only information that seemed to support those ideas and positions, dismissing the rest or ignoring it.

* Thinking I knew better than other people what was best for their particular lives and situations.

This one was really hard to break. It’s very easy to dictate for other people what they should “just” do, and I see a lot of Christians trying to do exactly this on a near-daily basis and then see them get absolutely gobsmacked when their victims react with outrage and anger over being treated in such a condescending and thoughtless manner. I wish I could say I was different, but I’m sure I wasn’t. Sometimes I thought I was being given divine knowledge of what was best for that other person. Sometimes I was merely working off of the rest of my framework–conceiving a poorly-informed opinion that I was convinced was right, then pressing that opinion on someone else who either hadn’t asked for it or who immediately objected that it didn’t really work in this case.

Maybe the problem was that I was very inexperienced at life. Maybe I was just an asshole.

Either way, as you can see, I left nothing to chance here.

With this framework, I looked at the entire universe and my place within it and came out with opinions and stances that were by turns ignorant, hopelessly narcissistic, arrogant, and thoughtlessly cruel. And when I got pushback, I was able to reconcile that pushback with my framework by telling myself that those folks just didn’t like hearing the truth I was dishing out. My society just couldn’t handle real morality anymore. My world just didn’t like knowing it was hurtling headlong toward a date with the Rapture and the Tribulation.

The problem is, this framework is like a gown doesn’t really fit very well over the dressmaker’s form that is reality. It stretches and tears in some places, sags and droops in others. I didn’t notice at first. I didn’t notice for a very long time. But eventually, I saw that not only was I not seeing stuff that other people saw, but that the way I had been taught to approach problems and issues tended to produce not coherency and peace but division and discord.

Climbing out of that pit started with a question:

What if every single thing I think about the world, truth, reality, and people is just wrong?

It isn’t much fun to think that one’s entire worldview is in error. Nobody likes to think that their entire foundation is wrong. A lot of folks might deconvert from Christianity but still insist up and down that some of its ideas were correct–and I wonder if the reason for that is because they just don’t want to think they were totally wrong. Surely some part of it was correct. Surely something is salvageable from all those years of indoctrination and devotion.

I struggled for years trying to fit my deconversion to my previous beliefs to arrive at a worldview that I wanted to believe was moral and correct before finally looking squarely at it all, as if I was one of those folks who wakes up from a coma and has to learn how to talk, walk, and eat all over again, and now was evaluating my world from a distance.

That’s when I finally began to unpack some of the stuff that had happened to me, and that’s when I finally began to recover from that previous life. I had to say “Okay, so what if it’s all totally wrong? What if not a single bit of it is right? What if it’s all a toxic sludge and none of it is actually salvageable? How would I know, and where would I go from there?”

And the funny thing is, when I did that, I did discover a couple of things about religion that aren’t totally awful–superfluous, yes, but not awful–and probably came out of the whole experience a lot closer to what Christians envision as a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ than I’d actually been as a Christian. Weird how that worked out. But I was finally basing my opinions and morality on reality rather than on wishful thinking and unfounded hopes, and that is what made the difference for me.

The good news is, we’ve got time.

When we deconvert, we don’t need to make any big personal changes right away. And often, we can’t anyway because of the emotional damage we have to deal with first, so it’s a good thing there isn’t a deadline. No, there’s no huge end-of-the-world life-or-death threat hanging over our heads, no Hell to fear, no divine fury to placate. We can move at whatever pace we feel is comfortable. We can put the whole question down for a long time–even, as I did, for years–and pick it up to toy with it like a Rubik’s Cube at our leisure. We can even solve facets of it and then set the matter down again for later consideration of its other facets (and indeed that’s how this growth normally seems to happen).

And some of us never get locked into the sort of framework I’m describing here, or maybe didn’t fall into every one of those mental traps. I’m speaking mostly about the really rowdy end of the religion, not the liberal/progressive schools of thought that don’t tend to be a problem for most folks anyway. Either way, I’m suggesting–very gently–that after we deconvert, that we often need to challenge the mindset that got us into the religion in the first place. If we’ve fallen into that sort of thinking, we shouldn’t expect that deconversion magically leads to enlightenment all by itself. We might have dropped the label, but the indoctrination might still be lurking back there in the dark corners of our psyches. It’s worth it to unlearn that indoctrination, though. I’m in no danger at all of falling back into something outlandish, and have avoided some potentially catastrophic scams and predation attempts because I did that work. This process protects us in a lot more ways than just the obvious one.

So strap in and join me next time when we take up with the first of these errors: that there’s some way to arrive at an objective fact other than the way we already have. See you Wednesday!