A post on the Patheos front page grabbed my attention last week. It was titled What Do You Do When You Doubt? This is a common question in any religion, and I was wondering if it might be helpful to Pagans.
Unfortunately, it was written by a priest in a conservative Catholic order, and so it assumes the absolute truth of the Catholic faith. That makes it unsuitable for anyone who isn’t a devout Catholic.
I don’t want to spend any time critiquing something written for the followers of another religion. Instead, I want to explore this question from a modern Pagan perspective.
Believing the “right” things is not what’s most important
The version of Christianity I grew up in called its adherents “believers” – emphasizing the importance of believing what the church said was true. Or at least, of affirming what the church said was true. It took me a long time to realize that when people told me “you need to just believe” what they were really saying was “stop talking about this because I don’t want think about it because I’m not sure I believe it either.”
When you’re told that the fate of your eternal soul depends on believing the right things, challenging what you’ve always been told is very, very hard.
In virtually all other religions – including the many forms of Paganism – what you believe is far less important than what you do. Religion isn’t about qualifying for the good place in the afterlife, it’s about living virtuously and heroically in this life. Live a good life and if you happened to believe the “wrong” things, you’ll learn something in the next life. Live a bad life and believing the “right” things won’t save you from learning some unpleasant lessons either in the Otherworld or in your next life.
[To be clear – I do not believe in rewards and punishments. I do believe in cause and effect.]
Because believing the “right” things isn’t what’s most important, doubts are of lesser concern in Paganism. But they can be a concern, and that concern needs to be actively addressed.
Religious questions are inherently uncertain
Are there many Gods, one God, or no Gods? After death do we live on in an afterlife, are we reincarnated into this life, or is this one life all we get? Different religions, cultures, and traditions have different answers, but how can we be sure any of them are correct?
We can’t.
It’s not that there’s no evidence. There’s lot of evidence. But it’s anecdotal, subjective, and conflicting. In the absence of conclusive evidence, doubt is unavoidable.
And that means one or both of two thing is true. Either knowing The Truth about religious questions is impossible (because it’s beyond the capacity of our brilliant but still limited human brains) or knowing The Truth isn’t particularly important.
So dealing with doubt begins with understanding that doubt is an honest response to questions that concern us but are impossible to answer with certainty.
Is something clearly true?
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge: how do we know what we think we know? We have to rely on more than just our own senses. Some things are beyond our ability to sense. Others are beyond our expertise to put into context and fully understand.
Science is a process of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. Over the centuries it has proven to be very reliable in telling us what is. It can’t always tell us if that’s good or not. But what science can do, it does very well.
Fundamentalists who argue for “Young Earth Creationism” are simply wrong. Realizing that if they were wrong about that, they were probably wrong about a lot of other things (and they are) was key in removing their indoctrination from my soul.
But when we move away from misreading myths as science and move into the realm of religion proper, science becomes less helpful. Science isn’t well suited to investigate religious and spiritual claims, in part because of the materialist assumptions of many scientists.
Still, if science tells us something is true, we can be reasonably confident that it is true.
Is it meaningful and helpful?
The question of doubt boils down to “what do we do when we can’t be sure?”
As in any case where you don’t have enough information, the first step is to dig deeper. Read more books, talk to experienced people, run your own experiments. You don’t need a laboratory to try something and see if it works.
I believe in magic because I’ve seen it work so many times it’s easier to just go with it than to keep trying to rationalize it away as an improbably string of coincidences.
And also, is something meaningful and helpful? Does it help you understand your place in the world? Does it help you deal with the challenges of life? Does it help you connect to something bigger than yourself?
When people ask my why I believe in the Gods, I talk about the stories of our ancestors and contemporary experiences and a continuum of spirits, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that my life is better with the Gods in it. I can’t prove they exist – I can’t prove they don’t exist. But prayer, meditation, offerings, worship, and the other things I do because I believe in the Gods makes my life better, and that’s enough for me.
Hold loosely but practice deeply
If you require certain answers to unanswerable questions you’ll be waiting your whole life.
If you grab hold of the first thing you come across – or cling to what you were taught as a child – you may be stuck in something that’s less than ideal, untrue, or even harmful.
What to do? Hold loosely but practice deeply.
Read, study, investigate. Figure out what your brain and your heart tell you is true. Make a conscious decision to follow that tradition, that path, that general direction. And then do it.
Remain open to new evidence, new experiences, new ways of thinking. If what you find – or what finds you – convinces you that your ideas aren’t correct, or that there’s something better, then change your mind – change your life. Too many people are afraid to admit they were wrong about anything. I say it’s better to admit you were wrong so you can start being right. Or closer to right. Or on a path that’s better suited for you even though it’s neither right nor wrong.
But while you’re following that path, explore it as deeply as you can. Go all in with whatever it is: worship the Gods, do divination, work magic – whatever beliefs and practices call to you. See where they take you. If it works for you, keep going. If it doesn’t, try something else.
It’s OK to change your spiritual or religious path. Just make sure you give it an honest try before you do.
Cherish your doubts
The first UU sermon I ever heard was by the late Rev. Suzanne Meyer, who preached “Cherish Your Doubts” at the UU Congregation of Atlanta sometime in 2001. The fact that I remember this after all these years tells you the impact it made on me.
Doubts keep you honest. Doubts keep you humble. Doubts keep you searching for the truth, which makes it possible to move closer to the truth even though you can never be sure just how close you are.
Doubts help you be tolerant and accepting of those who believe other things. You might be wrong and they might be right… or closer to right than you are. There’s no need to fight over things we can’t prove.
[There’s plenty of need to fight over behaviors and policies that discriminate against, demean, dehumanize others, but that’s another topic for another time. And also, vote!]
Doubts are only bad when you don’t deal with them, when you put off making even a tentative decision because thinking about hard questions is, well, hard.
Build a strong foundation through reading and study. Examine your spiritual experiences, and find what’s meaningful and helpful within them. Develop answers that will never be final, but that are enough to get you started. Then practice deeply and see where that practice takes you. All the while, remain open to new evidence, new experiences, and new ways of thinking. If you discover that what you think is wrong, or something else is better, change what you we think, and adjust your practices accordingly.
The answer to doubt is to hold loosely but practice deeply.
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