Seeker Project 4 Spiritual Exploration (SP4SE)
Techniques for exploring consciousness
Learn to test claims, weigh evidence, and spot errors in reasoning. These articles help you decide what to accept as true, and why.
The self-correction mechanism is the way a belief system notices its own mistakes and fixes them. It prevents extremism from taking control of the system. Systems that have it can grow and change. Systems that lose it tend to harden, and over time they can drift toward extremism.
Faith cannot overcome fear, because it only trades one fear for another. Facts can overcome fear by shrinking the unknown and giving you solid ground to stand on. Once you see how fear works and how it is used against you, its hold on your thinking begins to loosen.
An unconventional approach can save a believer from slipping into extremist thinking. This applies to both religious and political extremism. Confronting them with facts rarely helps. A different approach is needed. It invites questions and reflection before belief hardens into dogma.
Most people think faith is all a belief needs, but unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. Faith in things that cannot be seen or tested needs help to survive. It leans on a list of things the believer must learn not to believe. Once you see how that list is built, you can make … Continue reading Why Unbelief is Necessary to Make Belief Possible
Ritual, prayer, magic, and salvation may use very different language. Yet each can connect certain conditions with a promised result. A ritual causation formula helps us examine how that cause-and-effect claim is built.
Religious and spiritual language often uses the same words for different ideas. Words such as faith, spirit, truth, God, sacred, and belief seem straightforward. But often, two people realize they mean different things.
Cognitive dissonance is the tension that appears when beliefs conflict with new information. The strategies for dealing with cognitive dissonance help you manage conflict. This way, you won’t let the need for quick relief dictate your choice.
Most of us think we can spot propaganda, deception, and weak arguments. Yet these tactics work every day because they often sound reasonable at first. Practical axioms give us simple warning signs that tell us when to look closer.
Does the soul exist? Investigating the existence of the human spirit or soul seeks the answer. The question lacks a simple answer. There are at least seven different ways to approach this subject. We will look at each to see how it helps illuminate this topic.
Religious camouflage can make weak reasoning difficult to recognize. By hiding illogical thinking behind tradition, religions make unsupported claims seem reasonable. Spotting camouflage helps us make better decisions before accepting ideas.