Jenga blocks and beliefs

Hey Brother!

Changing your mind is hard. I've been thinking a lot about the differences in how we developed changed minds. You talked about your old way of thinking. How you went from one belief to the other, equally confident in both positions. What I found interesting about that was that I think we had very similar changes of mind, yet the way it changed was different.

I didn't really have the same issue with overconfidence that you had. Let's take your jenga metaphor and run with it. You talked about your beliefs as a jenga block, Where you would pull out jenga blocks until your old beliefs crumbled. Then you would find yourself just as confident in a new tower as you wer in the previous one. I had the opposite problem I would stand by my jenga tower, and defend it. I would decline to think about things. I would seek out people to reaffirm my preexisting beliefs, rather than acknowledging multiple perspectives. I was stagnant in my beliefs. This became harder and harder to sustain because instead of acknowledging my lack of confidence, I tried to cover it up. It was like the blocks in my tower were slowly being chipped away and I was just painting over the damage. I was worried that if I moved one block, my whole tower would tumble. I wasn't ready to do that. My beliefs were too much a part of my identity.

I remember the first time I let a block come out. I was in India. I looked out into a crowd full of hundreds of people and thought "If what I believe is true, I can be almost certain all of these people are going to hell". I knew this based exclusively on where these people lived. I realized that this just wasn't something that fit in with the rest of my beliefs. It wasn't the only block I pulled from my jenga tower.

The 6000 year old earth? No thanks. Sexism and homophobia? No thanks. A God who orders his people to commit genocide? No thanks. People burning for all of eternity because they grew up somewhere with a different name for God? Definitely not. Yet, rather than just watching my tower fall and walking away, I started to wonder if I really needed a tower. Maybe I could build a house, or a fort, or a raft. There are lots of different ways to combine blocks. The idea of there ultimately being a creator behind everything still makes sense to me, and so do the principals of Christianity that used to be so important to me. Honesty, forgiveness, love... those are still great ways to live your life. It's the blocks that get used to wall people out that I have trouble with, not the ones that get used to bridge people in.

One of my favourite things about university was that it taught me to think for myself. I can deconstruct what other people think, look at the individual pieces, and figure out if they have value. Before university I just picked my team and chose their beliefs. Now I see that belief isn't a team sport. I can form my own opinions on spirituality, politics, morality, and just about anything else, that are different from other people's beliefs and I can see the value in other people's beliefs too.

Now, there's a flip side to this too. Whenever anybody asks me if I'm Christian I have no idea what to say. I think I'm Christian, because I believe there's a God and a lot of my beliefs about that God are influenced by the Christian tradition. But at the same time when people hear the word Christian, they picture the jenga tower. The jenga tower that doesn't accept evolution, or gay people, or value in other peoples faiths. That's not me. So people ask me that question, and I either give an unsatisfactory answer, or end up in a long discussion about what the word Christian actually means.

But it's not just faith where I find myself giving unsatisfactory answers. It's a lot of life. Which can be tricky when you're a teacher and people look to you for advice. When a student asks me for advice I often find myself trying to present a balanced response where I weigh both sides for them, rather than pushing for what I  believe would be better for them. Because what if I'm wrong? What if my opinion makes them choose the wrong thing? It's hard to navigate the roads when you feel like you don't know which way you're going, Blurry lines work great for beliefs, but aren't practical on road maps.

It's times like that I wish I had the same confidence in my positions that you talked about previously having in your post. Maybe it would help me give advice and steer people who are trouble prone in the right direction. I guess what I'm getting to is, do you have any advice on giving advice?