#I'm just saying. Some of you claim to be kindergarten teachers but are describing an assistant locksmith job.

[technofinch]

What I'm learning from the overly specific jobs poll is that a lot of you jump to infantilizing your coworkers/clients/customers rather than taking a critical look at your actual job duties and purpose. Which is fine. Also that a surprising number of you have operated a cotton candy machine

[lambposting]

Some Thoughts on Religion and Personality

I've been doing a lot of thinking about religious faith, and it truly is an odd and interesting thing. I was raised in a small church community, went to private religious schools from kindergarten through college, and have many religious family members (including a grandfather who spent many years as a minister and teacher), yet I have never been able to feel any experience that I would describe as "spiritual" or "religious" in nature. I've also tried over the course of 2 separate periods (in highschool and college) to study theology with an open mind, and I have even lived my life as a religious person for several years in total. I've made many religious friends, professed religious belief (technically a lie but with good intentions; fake it till you make it, as they say), behaved as if God were real, prayed, went to church, spent dozens of even hundred if hours pouring over apologetics and responses to them, spoken privately with ministers about my questions and interpretations of scripture, etc. Basically, I've tried just about everything out of an earnest belief that I should be fair and open-minded, and that the testimony of many friends and family was valuable. But, at the end of the day, I've only become more and more confident that whatever other people profess to experience and believe just doesn't work for me. That seems like a deviation from the norm—both considering that many people intuitively find religion plausible, and that many current atheists who grew up in similar circumstances were believers at one point, but later changed their mind—which makes me curious.

I suppose that there are two basic solutions: either I'm very lucky and just rolled the right personality type and intuition to never get misled into faith, or I'm very unlucky and my inborn personality and intuition make it almost impossible for me to be "saved" or "enlightened". Obviously I'd sooner believe the former than the latter, but I will never be able to experience another person's mind so I'll never know for sure. That being said, it is interesting to try to draw correlations between my personality and my beliefs.

Disclaimer

This next part is largely conjecture based off of my limited understanding of psychology and UsefulCharts' 3 part series describing his PhD research on the personality types of atheists (here's part 2 of a 3 part series on it: https://youtu.be/xejfuTNov7Y), so PLEASE take this only as a layman's understanding, even if I'm borrowing some ideas from a PhD holder (I'm writing about my personal experience and insights, not what is most popular in a group, so don't expect 1:1 relevance claims between me and UsefulCharts).

There are two main assessments that I've used: the widely supported "big five" model, and the much more controversial Meyers-Briggs model (although, as UsefulCharts explains, these two are somewhat interlinked and analogous). I'll use both to demonstrate my current ideas about the potential relationship between my personality and my lack of religious belief.

Oh, and one more disclaimer: I'm going to try and condense my ideas as much as possible, so if it ever feels like I'm just indulging in self-flattery then please just imagine the long ramble that I would normally give about how I don't think I'm particularly special or great in any way. I'm not trying to be cool or impressive; I'm trying to summarize my perceived traits.

Big Five

For this model, I generally score as follows: Very high neuroticism, very low extraversion, medium-high openness to experience, high agreeableness, and medium-low conscientiousness. I think at least some of these traits could correlate with my inability to be convinced of religious claims, so I'll go through them now.

Neuroticism: For me the role of neuroticism is relevant in the form of the constant fear of being deluded because of the potential consequences. As such, I probably spend more time than average attempting to study philosophy as a means of easing my anxiety. However, this could be a weakness if fear blinds me from admitting when I actually am wrong. I'm unsure as to how relevant this trait is.

Extraversion: I hate most social activities, and therefore don't gain many of the communal benefits that come from religious practice. I don't feel like I belong, and therefore don't have as much to lose by rejecting religious social groups. I think this trait is of middling relevance.

Openness: I don't like many new physical or social experiences because of the aforementioned neuroticism and introversion, but I love new ideas and methods of analyzing and understanding the world. I think that this contributes highly to a willingness to carefully consider propositions that many people intuitively accept or reject. I suspect that this trait is highly relevant.

Agreeableness: This is the trait where I split from many atheists and contrarians: I'm actually quite agreeable in that I strongly desire peace and cooperation, and don't like fighting with people or making them upset. I'd expect this trait to lead me towards religious belief, not away from it, as I'm incentivised by my personality to not break off from the flock. However, I think there is a big difference between not wanting to cause trouble in a social interaction and believing the same things as the person you're interacting with. Therefore, I rate this as of low relevance to me, even though for some it might be the most relevant trait.

Conscientiousness: I don't really see any relevance in this trait. I score near enough to the middle, and even if I did have a particularly high or low score, I'm not sure how it would affect my religious beliefs.

Meyers-Briggs

I score as an INTP most of the time that I take MBTI tests, with the next closest score being INTJ. This section will be brief as there is less to discuss.

[I]ntroverted: I've covered this already. Middling relevance.

I[N]tuitive: See: openness. Some might argue that someone who is more pragmatic and down-to-earth (an Ob[s]ervant type according to the MBTI) might be more likely to ditch religion than us conceptual and creative types, but for me personally it is my desire for new and interesting philosophical knowledge that most strongly turned me away from religion. High relevance.

[T]hinking: I think that there's an obvious connection between a preference for thinking over [F]eeling and a disbelief in many religious claims. This is not to say that religious people are overly emotional or that atheists are hyper-rational lords of logic, but I strongly suspect that many religious people are emotionally driven in their beliefs (most theists are hardly world-class apologists, for example). That's fine, but as someone who is more driven my neurotic self-examination and overthinking I am just not right for that avenue of belief. Very high relevance.

[P]rospecting: See: conscientiousness. I score near the middle between prospecting and [J]udging, and I think that neither is particularly relevant to my beliefs. Maybe you could spin this in towards me being somewhat more relaxed and nonconformist about my beliefs? Low relevance.

Conclusion

This post could have been a lot longer and still not contain all of the information that might be useful or interesting, so I'm leaving it as the (relatively) brief explanation that it is at the moment. I will probably end up posting more about philosophy, theology, and apologetics in the future, so I hope that my audience of mostly porn bots finds this type of post interesting. Maybe in the future I'll do some actual research and interview a few people.

Anyways, I hope you all find peace and happiness, regardless of your faith 😈🥂.

-lamb