Originally Posted by ordinaryguy
margog85 (may I call you margo?)--
Unless I missed it, you haven't said how old you are, but you remind me of my twentysomething self. I also was raised in the cocoon of The One True Church (different denomination, same concept), and found myself questioning and doubting more and more of what everybody around me accepted as being self-evidently true without comment, much less earnest discussion or soul searching.
What I admire most in your post is the unflinching honesty with which you are confronting your loss of belief. It takes a lot of courage to leave the group and strike out on your own as an individual. It isn't an easy path, and I have sometimes almost (but not quite, not really) envied the friends of my youth who stayed within the cocoon and made a life and career completely enclosed and encased therein.
As far as I've been able to learn (and I have a Ph.D., so you can trust me on this), mathematics is the only field of human endeavor where "proof" is a meaningful concept. Oh, sure, lawyers throw the term around a lot, but there's always some qualifier, "beyond a reasonable doubt", "by a preponderance of the evidence" or some such logically squishy concept.
So if it's proof you really want, study mathematics. Everything else is inference and interpretation.
If you can't, you can't, so stop wasting your effort and attention trying to do the impossible. Accept it, and let it go. There are far more useful things to do with your mind than worry over your inability to believe. I tend to think the difference between people in this regard is either genetic or very early (embryonic) developmental. Some brains are wired that way, some aren't. It can't be helped.
There you go reminding me of myself again. Maybe we both have kind of a minimalist transcendental mind function. It seems like it would be much easier to either have none at all, or else to be fully connected. This having one foot on either side of the crack between the worlds can be unnerving, I'll vouch for that.
Speaking only for myself, I have decided to treat this as is a problem that doesn't need to be solved.
Either they have a personal subjective conviction, (which you obviously don't have) or they take somebody else's word for it (which you apparently can't do). It's one of the many ways people differ from one another. People who would kind of, almost, like to believe the prevailing myths of their culture, but can't really, have probably existed nearly universally, but always as a minority, except possibly during times of great social upheaval.
I would suggest that you reexamine your assumption that whatever-it-is is "out there" and fully approachable by means of observation and reason.
Your will directs your attention. Whether you direct your attention toward the inward, subjective realm, or into the outward, objective world, you will eventually encounter the boundary between Self and Not-Self.
Like every boundary, it's fuzzy if you examine it closely enough.
I wish you godspeed on your quest.
