An "honest questioner" is someone who sincerely attempts to ask honest questions, seek honest answers, who consciously and deliberately strives to be honest with oneself throughout the discovery process. An honest questioner rigourously and conscientiously recognizes that he or she is a product of a specific milieu and culture and, as such, has been inculcated with a set of ideas, traits, biases, and core beliefs dynamically conjoined to his or her environment.
The geographical location of one's birth and upbringing has as much impact on one's belief system as do parental and societal influences, psychological and emotional impressions, and other determining factors such as health, family income, religious affiliation, and education. Aware of these, an honest questioner will not assume offhand that his or her worldview is correct or warranted simply because it is the most familiar, imbued in the surrounding society, culturally conventional, traditional, or within easy reach.
An honest questioner will look at all sides of an issue and look beyond the belief system effectualized through birth placement, upbringing, culture, or society.
What is at issue is the process of belief itself and the myriad assumptions and presuppositions one must necessarily overlook in order to continue supporting the belief process. Unlike many people, the honest questioner is acutely aware of threads of assumption interwoven throughout the fabric of belief and will pick and pull at these, perhaps unravelling the whole tapestry, as part of his or her questioning process.
Unless one is willing to dismantle the familiar and comfortable in search of truth and admit to assumptions and prejudices, hopes and fears, wishes and weaknesses, one is not an honest questioner. All too often one is rather a "true believer," someone who has given little or no thought to the reasons one believes, how one believes, the psychological underpinnings of belief, or the many assumptions that are neglected in the course of believing.
We will be looking at each of these along the way while raising questions about belief, faith, reason, knowledge, methodology, research, and evidence-gathering. There's so much we don't know we don't know, but with courage and commitment we might find our answers traveling a thousand different avenues, and make discoveries, and finally embrace truth wherever it is found, even if it is the last thing we expected.
Most people unknowingly adhere to irrational, unexamined, and superstitious beliefs. Many religious people come to accept church teachings and doctrines with a host of hidden beliefs, ideas, assumptions, fears, and psychological motives they unconsciously seek confirmed, pampered, or placated. If they are willing to question old beliefs they almost always replace these with new teachings and beliefs they presuppose are somehow more "real" and "sensible" than those previous. Hardly ever do they take the next step and question this new set of beliefs and teachings with as much urgency and soul-searching as they might have applied to their preceding belief system. Why is that?
In many cases it is a defense mechanism, an unconscious process used to shield anxieties and fears associated with one's most instinctive sense of self. Most often what is hidden is the fear of death, loneliness, low self-esteem, poor self-image, ignorance, guilt, childhood trauma or bad childhood memories. Even believers who have experienced deep spiritual epiphanies will continue to cling to superstitious ideas and irrational beliefs in an unconscious effort to find security in the face of the unknown. It is this grasping for security in all its forms that limits self-awareness and acerbates a noetic imbalance that promotes further guilt, suffering, confusion, or defeatist, docile, or untested thinking. It is ironic that in not wanting to face the beast of one's anxieties, ignorance, and fears, one will embrace an unexamined belief system that further enables anxiety, ignorance, and fear to become dominant. This creates a vicious circle—as fears, ignorance, and anxieties begin to dominate the more are unexamined beliefs adopted and embraced to the exclusion of studied and rational thinking.
In order to break this cycle, you must want to know truth more than you want to feel secure, protect the status quo, or preserve your belief image. You must be willing to engage in sometimes hard and time-consuming work, get your hands dirty, tear the cover off your fears, anxieties, wishes, and dreams, and pull them kicking into the harsh light of reality. You must find the courage to ask difficult questions, uncomfortable questions, uneasy, even irreverent, questions. You must be willing to place the search for truth above everything else—your beliefs, your religion, your concept of God, even your own salvation. Unless you are willing to do this you are being dishonest with yourself and any questions you formulate will be clouded with dishonesty, your search subverted by opportunism and self-interest. For the sake of truth, then, presume nothing, be honest with yourself, know your weaknesses and biases, understand your assumptions, ask difficult questions, read different types of books, study a broad range of topics, research history, take classes, return to school, learn a language, take as much time as you need, and test everything you encounter while pursuing truth along a thousand avenues of inquiry.
Truth is willing to journey along a thousand avenues of inquiry, self-deception insists there is only one
- Self-Deception by Herbert Fingarette
- Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology Of Self Deception By Daniel Goleman
- Perspectives on Self-Deception by Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Editors)
- Self-Deception Unmasked by Alfred R. Mele
- Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control by Alfred R. Mele
- Autonomous Agents : From Self-Control to Autonomy by Alfred R. Mele
- Motivation and Agency by Alfred R. Mele
- The Oxford Handbook of Rationality by Alfred R. Mele
- Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Editor)
- The Theory and Practice of Autonomy by Gerald Dworkin
- Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton
- Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
