Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [93]
Anita was a talented artist, and when she was twenty, she was accepted into art school in New York. Surprisingly, her parents let her go. (“I think they worried that if they opposed it, they’d lose me entirely,” she recalled. “I also think they figured I’d be back in six months.”) Shortly before she was to leave, a fellow church member—one who had been beloved by the congregation and had served as a kind of older sister and second mother to Anita—was killed in a car accident. For Anita, it opened up the first conscious fissure in her faith. “Here was a woman who embodied the essence of what Jesus was trying to teach. And she finally had everything she wanted: a husband, three young children—she was thirty when she died. I was really sad and really angry, and I remember in church there was all this singing and clapping, and no room at all for grief. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, now she is where she’s supposed to be.’ That’s the first time I can remember thinking: this is bullshit.”
Anita went ahead and moved to New York, where she met a man who was, for lack of a better term, a practicing atheist. Like other people’s belief, his nonbelief shaped his ethics and his understanding of the world—and also his community, since his family and many of his friends were similarly nonreligious. Improbably or otherwise, Anita and the man fell in love. Through dating him, she came to reject the evangelical Christianity of her upbringing and adopt his worldview instead. As dramatic as that transition might seem, it was, she recalled, “relatively easy. I had the support of all these people who didn’t believe in God, and they were smart and sophisticated. And it was so refreshing to be around people who were actually curious about the world and unafraid to ask questions.”
Then Anita and her boyfriend broke up—and here is where her story of wrongness really begins. In meeting the atheist and his community, she had encountered a whole different belief system than the one she had grown up with. Faced with two different and incompatible theories about the world—an almost Kuhnian conflict of paradigms—she chose his. But when the relationship fell apart, the support structure that had made that choice both tenable and desirable collapsed as well, and it took the belief system with it. By then, though, it was too late to return to the faith of her family. It had sprung too many holes, was too much at odds with both the world she saw around her and the voice she heard within her. A thousand years before her birth, al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher, meditated on precisely this problem. Of the irreversibility of breaking with past beliefs, he wrote, “There can be no desire to return to servile conformism once it has been abandoned, since a prerequisite for being a servile conformist is that one does not know [oneself] to be such.” But when someone recognizes his former beliefs as false, al-Ghazali continued, “the glass of his servile conformism is shattered—an irreparable fragmentation and a mess which cannot be mended by patching and piecing together.” Instead, he concluded, “it can only be melted by fire and newly reshaped.”†
Melted by fire: that is the crucial phrase. Raised to be afraid of a literal hell, Anita suddenly found herself plunged