Asking QuestionsLook yourself in the mirror and ask yourself:
If your convictions were wrong, would you want to know about it?
Or would you prefer not to know and continue living in blissful ignorance?
Do you seek out books, web sites, people, and ideas that challenge your currently held opinions, ideologies and beliefs?
Or do limit the ideas that make it to your brain by submerging yourself in thoughts that promote your pre-determined faith?
Do you seek out the weaknesses in your current opinion and the strengths in competing opinions?
Or do you dwell on the strengths of your own position and the weaknesses of your opponent's position?
Do you hold your current beliefs because a thorough analysis of the evidence demands that you hold them?
Or do you hold your current beliefs because they are the beliefs that you want to have?
Is your highest value to be faithful?
Or is your highest value to have intellectual honesty?
Trust those who seek the truth.
Don't trust those who claim to have it.
Conducting your search for truth with intellectual honesty is harder than it sounds.
There is a significant difference between building your convictions upon integrity and being sincere in your convictions.
Just about everybody in the world believes that their personal beliefs are the correct ones.
As a matter of fact, most of us are absolutely certain that our beliefs are the correct ones.
When we see certainty in others we call them obstinate.
When we see it in ourselves we call ourselves faithful.
When our faithfulness causes us to be obstinate so that we refuse to consider new evidence and potentially better paradigms, we may still be sincere in our convictions, but our convictions will no longer be based upon intellectual honesty.
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