Anonymous asked Staff ago Hello,
I encounter, again and again, people near to me, adults who come from utterly secular backgrounds and who chose to become religious, who shut their ears and their minds.
In conversations I have had, again and again I hear arguments which seem to have been planted in their brains, claims which make it difficult to argue and which turn us onto personal tracks and irrational, imaginary areas.
I encounter, among other arguments, ones such as: matters of faith do not require physical proof, delegitimatization of secular scientific sources, charging them with conflicts of interest and manipulation by anonymous agents, and mainly a lack of distinction between pleasant feelings which come in the wake of study and dealing with spiritual matters and nearly blind faith in primitive, sometimes even delusionary, people and ideas.
How can one deal with these arguments and others which, no doubt, you know of, provided that the people are not completely shut down and are still at the first stages in their return to religion?
Ron
jsadmin Staff answered 20 years ago
Dear Ron,
The process of returning to religion stems from psychological factors: searching for an alternative to a melancholy emotional state. In this state a person reflexively, unconsciously, reacts in a paradoxical, strange, and delusionary manner, as you have described. A person who is in the swing of the process can be spoken to, but there is limited success, and it is almost impossible. From our vast experience, this is what you must do after you carefully read the material on our site and you feel you are expert in it:
1. You must know how to focus the conversation and state this in advance. Whenever they run from the topic, stop the discussion and lead them back to it. It is the way of the religious in general and those who have returned to religion specifically to move from topic to topic, to skip and jump amongst unrelated issues, for that is the way of a believing person’s soul, to tolerate contradiction, to blur and to confuse.
2. The topic you offer should be real and actual, and you should focus only upon it. (He will try to fly off to areas in which he feels more comfortable; don’t allow him to.) Some examples are the contradictions between science and Torah (prepare by reading the pamphlets on this site), the contradictions between universal ethics and the tribal morals of the Jewish religion (see the essays Morality in Halacha, Gentiles in Halacha, The Status of Women in Halacha, and The Secular Jew’s Place in Halacha).
3. Try to convince his rabbi to come discuss these topics. (The rabbis themselves are afraid to be caught out as ignorant and they always refuse to come talk with anyone who is expert.) It will shake their faith in their rabbi.
4. Do not give up on them and do not leave them alone until the issue has been cleared up (to themselves as well), until they explicitly tell you they are not expert and do not want to be. If they claim “I am not expert,” tell them you are prepared to discuss it with their rabbi, in their presence, as equals.
But most important is preventative medicine, to offer the secular public the ideology of the enlightened world — an ideology worth fighting for, something which, if harmed, is as though our very souls were harmed. Educating to ethics as something which must be fought for is sorely lacking in the educational system, and I would risk saying that it does not exist at all. The reason for this is the educational system’s evasion of serious discussion of the country’s character and the definition of a modern Jew who has left his father’s religion.
The answer to your question is in the title above — man, out of psychological distress, freely chooses to be brainwashed.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet