This isn't a diatribe against the religious right. I was thinking about what we're asking when we discuss people giving up something they take on faith, believe in the absence of evidence, as opposed to what we know from critical thought and empirical evidence.
I am curious as to whether a PET scan, or some other device, could identify an organic difference between the mental processes of "true believers" (religious or from either side of the political spectrum) and ambivalent skeptics. I've never experienced the former's certitude, and am far enough along in my life to doubt I ever will.
Perhaps those of us who aspire to a critical, fact based sensibility don't understand that we have an certain quality. We expect our opinions to change over time. Trying to get over a shift from Newtonian to quantum paradigms doesn't change our lives that much.
Beliefs based on faith can also change. I've known people whose faith was deep, and on one occasion seen that faith fail. It wasn't very pretty to watch. The story is below
The nominal group that hung out in the study room for my department at college was mostly underachievers more interested in the happy hours and ID carding policies of local watering holes than adding much to the accomplishments of mankind.
One exception was Q- (sorry, I love that letter thing). While the rest of us were proud of our sophomoric ennui, Q- was consistently upbeat and energized. Her Roman Catholic upbringing had given her a strong sense of a relationship with God. She wasn't pious or judgmental toward her dissipated peers. I felt a certain tinge of jealousy, that she could find comfort in her faith and still wear that grace so lightly.
I imagined hers was the beatific presence of Catholic saints, at least those rare holy women who avoided the kind of gory endings so popular in paintings shown in my art history classes.
After I'd known her for a while things she started to change.
I never really found out the source of her transformation. Her smile didn't appear so often. Her walk went from a purposeful stride into the hesitant shuffle the rest of us used for locomotion. She was no longer a creature comfortable in her own skin. Even her complexion darkened.
She started accepting those invitations to join the group and spend too many afternoons at whichever place had $2 pitchers and was very unlikely to card anyone.
At some point the change was so obvious to I asked her about it. During our conversation she talked about losing her connection to God. When what she believed changed, much of her life was altered. It's not like a "secular humanist" deciding that evolution happens in fits and starts, rather than gradually.
Watching her anguish in dealing with that loss was one of the more moving experiences of my life. In retrospect I suppose that she was suffering depression. I don't know whether the depression was the cause or the result of her loss. I just know that when she sought that solace I've never known, and couldn't find it, it caused her great pain.
I haven't seen her in a long time, and don't know if her faith ever returned. Part of me missed that nice, optimistic anomalous member of the group. There was schadenfreude in seeing her as perplexed by growing up as the rest of us.
So before we ask people to set aside faith, let's at least agree that we are asking them to make a huge existential leap: trade certainty for ambiguity, comfort for longing, a sense of place for the constant need to find one's bearing.
Would I trade her faith for my own world view? Probably not. Do I understand at least part of it's allure? Sure.