Facing Rabbi Ishmael on my Summer Vacation
(Continued)

“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things,” wrote Lewis Carroll to young Mary MacDonald in 1864. Yet growing up with the right kind of in-depth religious training can train the muscles of the mind to accept levels of belief alongside rigorous critical thinking.

When the mind is young and flexible it can stretch to accept that, at one level, there is a set of rules for critically analysing texts. At another level, it can understand that a memorable fable about beauty and cruelty may not be as true as the story that the Beatles broke up because of Yoko; yet in some sense may be more true. The religious skeptic can both analyse fact and evaluate belief.

When this works it can be a firm basis for a sensitive skepticism. A girl can understand that some of her friends believe that a long-dead Greek bishop comes into their houses through the ventilation system and brings them gifts. She can understand that this belief is part of a system of reward and punishment in which there is only reward and no punishment. She can understand that in some circumstances the tale of an undead intruder who is not kept out by doors and locks would be frightening but in this case it is cheery. She can understand that while there is discrimination and racism in the world, the fact that the dead Greek bishop brings no gifts to Jewish children isn’t racist. She can understand that the whole story is in a sense untrue but still in a sense believable.

Moreover, she can understand and respect the fact that her friends believe something that would otherwise be marginally less-believable than the business with the girl and the bears and the porridge.

Taking this kind of training into adulthood need not turn us into credulous believers in whatever nonsense charlatans can dream up. The devout Roman Catholic and keen anti-Semite G.K. Chesterton is widely reputed to have said that “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything”. (He may have said it, but it appears he never wrote it.) In this Chesterton was not only being a smug bastard about his own religion, he was making an observation. Those who haven’t been taught how to believe properly are poorly equipped when they confront belief.

Skeptics know that the saddest victims of paranormal claims are brilliant scientists (yea, verily, Nobel laureates) who, when working outside their fields are taken in by charlatans. They haven’t been trained to work with and understand things like stage magic which can take advantage of their preconceptions and make monkeys of them. The advantage that religious people can have when confronting nonsense is that we are connoisseurs. We know the flavour of good nonsense from bad nonsense.

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