Terrell Clemmons was a recent guest and guest co-host on the Knight and Rose Show. I noticed she has not one, but FOUR new articles on the Discovery Institute Science and Culture website. I waited until all 4 had been published to write about the series. It’s about the intellectual journey of J. Budziszewski from nihilism back to Christianity. He is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Our regular host of the Knight and Rose Show (Desert Rose) loves Jay’s books. She is using them for her D. Min thesis, which is about natural law. Jay actually has a new book out about 30 popular beliefs that are completely false. The book explains why people believe delusions and also offers suggestions for avoiding delusions.
The first article in Terrell’s series is here. It talks about the new book:
In 30 succinct chapters, Budziszewski addresses 30 delusions related to virtue and happiness, politics and government, family and sexuality, God and religion, even human nature and reality itself. He doesn’t polemicize for “sides” on the controversial subjects nearly so much as help us think through falsehoods clouding our current milieu.
As soon as I read what the book was about, I wondered if he was going to talk about how people form their beliefs based on what is easy, convenient and popular with their social groups. And he does, as we will see.
Here is the second article. This one is about Jay’s spiritual journey:
Terrell asks:
After all that, how did you come to profess Christian faith once again?
And here is part of Jay’s answer that I liked:
I hadn’t lost my faith by a rational process either. I just thought I saw through it. In my milieu, all the smart people didn’t believe in God. And I unconsciously wanted to believe I was one of the smart people. There were many other things that pushed me away from faith, but that’s one example of my own motivated irrationality. Another is that I’d committed some sins. I didn’t want to face God, so I stopped believing in him. That’s irrational, too.
I’ve now spent over 27 years in the IT industry, including internships and summer jobs. I have met so many people who grew up in intact Christian homes, some who went to Christian private schools, who abandoned their Christian faith the minute they hit college. When I ask them what the arguments and evidence were that changed their minds, it is almost universally two things. 1) I wanted to be seen as smart by the new social group, and 2) I was away from home for the first time and didn’t want to follow moral rules. That’s it. I mean, part of it is that their entire Christian upbringing had never been grounded on a stitch of evidence, but those are the two reasons I get the most often.
Here’s the third article. This one talks about how people suppress moral knowledge, which is something Jay did during his lost years.
Terrell asks:
Speaking about things that are inherent to being human, you’ve also written that “the longing for truth, for purity, for lightness is indestructible,” but that at the same time, “the fear of truth, of purity, and of lightness is also very strong.” How do you see this play out in your observations of human interactions?
And here is the part from Jay’s response that I liked:
Freud talked about the suppression of libido — his term for the sexual drive — and all the crazy things that he thought happened to us when libido is suppressed. But I don’t think he knew the first thing about it. Because the drive I have in mind — this inclination to know the truth, especially the truth about God — may express itself in indirect or distorted ways when we suppress it. By suppressing it, I mean, for example:
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to change.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to admit that I was wrong.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because it puts me to shame.
- I don’t want to know the truth about God because he’s so good that it scares me. I don’t want him to be that good. I don’t want him to love me that much, more than I love myself.
We do suppress the desire for the truth, and the consequences of suppressing the desire for the truth are far more potent and powerful than the consequences of suppressing libido.
One of the Bible passages that I found so amazing as a kid growing up in a trash communist country was Romans 1. Romans 1 is the kind of chapter that has the ability to yank a kid out of the atheistic communism he is surrounded by (parents, teachers, government, etc.) and propel him to move to the reddest state in the United States of America. By any means necessary. You should read Romans 1 and make everyone you know read it. It is the “magic glasses” that turns the ship around. Whether you agree with it or not, it describes the way the world really is.
But aside from that, I just want to point out that many famous atheists agree with Jay about the suppression of truth. I wrote about a bunch of them in this old blog post from 2011. Wow! That was a long time ago.
And finally, the fourth article. This is about how morality is related to public policy and government.
Terrell asks:
On your blog, you have called wokeness “status signaling,” as opposed to “virtue signaling.” What did you mean by that?
And this is the part of his reply that I liked best:
I saw a pair of bumper stickers on the right and left side of a back bumper. One said, “Save the laboratory animals,” and the other said, “I’m pro-choice, and I vote.” The driver wanted to save the little bunnies, and not have them hurt, for example, by having cosmetics put in their eyes for testing. But she didn’t want to save the little humans. There wasn’t much penetrating thinking about right and wrong there, but there was a very sharp awareness of what was acceptable in her milieu and of what attitudes would give her approval among people in it: “The people that I associate with would never say it’s wrong to have an abortion, or that it shouldn’t be a woman’s choice. That’s just not done.”
You can see this in Austin, a sort of ideological hothouse populated largely by woke professional classes. They’re all imitating each other and imitating each other’s attitudes. It’s about conformism. It’s much more about that than about conscience.
My friend Bonnie told me recently that she never met a person who believed more in “engineering belief”. I engineer my own beliefs and the beliefs of others by making choices about what to consume, and meddling in what other people consume, too. So, for me, I don’t watch anything on TV, streaming services, and new movies (unless they are war movies like Midway (2019) and Greyhound (2020). I was forced to watch the first Star Wars movies as a kid, but I’ve never seen any of the new ones.
On the other hand, I fill my head with good stuff like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, free-market economics and military history. If I want to build up another Christian, I buy them the books that I want them to read, like Thomas Sowell books, and then I give them rewards for reading them. Or, I take them to places and do activities where they have a practical experience of gaining knowledge or solving a problem. This is how I build up their resistance to the sorts of social pressures that Jay talked about. And it works on other people. One of my friends loves Salvo magazine, so I bought her 25 back issues because it’s her birthday this week. I’m trying to level her up.
I think that when it comes to anything in life, if it is important to you to believe it, then it should be important to you to show your work. And before you can show your work, you have to do your work. If you want to change your mind about something, the best thing to do is to read the best books you can understand and watch or listen to debates. And test it for yourself. That way, you can explain how you arrived at your beliefs. That process almost always makes you resistant to the surrounding culture. And that means you are one step ahead of the people who just believed whatever was easy and convenient.
Unfortunately, most people who grow up in Christian homes don’t get the idea that the process of doing your work is important. We have to fix that.
Be effective and influential:
WINTERY KNIGHT 