Every now and then, I hear about a friend or friend of a friend looking into changing religions. My family is mostly Jewish (though I’m an atheist), and so occasionally friends who’re looking into converting will come along to synagogue or a seder or something.
My question is: How in the world does one change one’s religion? I mean, a religion is a set of factual claims about the world - “There is a magical entity (or more rarely, set of magical entities) that created the universe, have such-and-such properties, and insist that you behave in the manner set out in Holy Book X.” The problem is, there’s no evidence for any of this.
So, how does one come to believe “I once believed that Entity X existed - this was a mistake, and in truth Entity Y created the universe”?
Which is why they can switch. It’s all baseless, self indulgent fantasy being asserted as reality; the assertion that they can simply declare reality to be what they want it to be. So there’s no reason they can’t declare different contradictory fantasies to be true every alternate Wednesday. If they cared about facts or logic in the first place they wouldn’t be religious at all.
Religion is not a logical thing; it’s a creture of the emotions and the group. You can’t argue your way into believeng or not believing a religion; you have to be brought up in an environment that associates the religion with good feelings in your mind. Usually childhood does this. Accelerated courses of this during adulthood would be called brainwashing, I suppose. But it’s also the kind of thing that happens to varying degrees during political rallies, military training, boarding school, or sports events.
This is why I am always puzzled by people who change their religion as adults. There have been several threads on the boards by converts to various religions, none of the threads recent. When they ‘converted’, were they simply confirming a direction that they were already heading in, even if they were possibly starting from a very different location? I just can’t see people foing from full-bore belief in religion A to full-bore belief in religion B.
Then there’s the money to be made… ahem, in let’s just say, parts of the world. I give you x$, you pray to my God now. Guess what the poor guy who does not have anything to eat, makes of that offer.
I think you’re coming at this from the wrong angle if you start by talking about comparing the evidence for one religion against another. I would say it’s more a question of how people feel about life.
You could lose faith in the teachings of the religion, as some people do when they reject Biblical literalism in favor of a more fact-based understanding of the world, for example. Or they could lose faith in the leadership of the religion because of a scandal.
Or you can do like a lot of people (including, I guess, me) and do the “grow up Christian, reject it as a teenager, spend your 20’s as an agnostic or atheist, go Buddhist in your 30’s” thing. In other words, you aren’t really being a reactionary now that you’ve grown up, and you’re looking for a different framework for your life. But not with any of that God stuff that you didn’t want in the first place.
Religion IMO is a mix of the emotional and those factual claims you mentioned. It really depends on what your friends mix is of those things. Is he looking for a spiritual community with certain values and the specific views are secondary, or is he looking for a doctrine he believes in. Must he have JC as Lord and Saviour or is JC as teacher and spiritual leader okay? It varies from person to person.
It is kind of like morals. You don’t adopt the morals your religion wants, usually, you adopt the religion that has the morals you like. In this case, a person who wants to get something out of religion (good music, saying nasty things about people you don’t like or whatever) and chooses a religion to match. Anyone who approaches the problem of one of choosing a religion which makes accurate statements about the world will soon become an atheist or a deist.
Community and relationships play into it as well. People like the group, or they convert for SO’s.
Conversion seldom involves going from one strong religious belief to another, by the way. In general, it’s not like people are strongly Jewish Orthodox one day, then are suddenly persuaded to Catholicism. What’s more typical is that they are lackadaisical, indifferent or even hostile to the religion they grew up with, so it’s easy to try a new one. It’s not like they have to be de-converted from their first religion. That’s usually either already happened, or their affiliation has become so weak and nominal that they might as well not have had one.
That’s what you believe. Other people may arrive at a different conclusion, and if one does not understand that, then one cannot understand how people do choose their religious beliefs.
This is a misconception I’ve seen often on the SDMB, but there’s more to religion than just a set of beliefs about the world which are either true or false. Religion does indeed include beliefs about God (or gods), about the meaning and purpose of life, about how one should live, and about what (if anything) lies beyond this material world and this present life. And as for whether or not there is evidence for any religious beliefs, that gets down to what you consider “evidence.”
But also, a religion is not just a set of beliefs. It’s a community or extended family to which one belongs; it’s a set of rituals and practices one participates in; it’s a set of symbols and metaphors and parables through which one attempts to understand an underlying reality that maybe can’t otherwise be described; it’s a point of view from which to look at the world; it’s a way of life.
(If you want a cite, here’s a dictionary definition of religion, and here’s a website that explores the issues involved in defining religion.)
Where different religions differ, some of those differences are mutually incompatible claims, so that if one is right, another must be wrong. But other differences are differences in style rather than substance, differences in ways of doing things where there is not necessarily just one right way, different language and imagery attempting to describe the same underlying reality.
As for how people choose a religion:
Some people take the intellectual approach of investigating the claims and beliefs of various religions to see which (if any) make sense, or are reasonable, or or best explain the world as one has experienced it.
Some people take the “church shopping” approach of visiting, observing, and or taking part in different religious communities until they find one that “fits”: that feels comfortable to them, that meets their needs, that doesn’t raise any red flags, that allows them to “experience God” or the equivalent, that gives them the opportunity to participate in something worth being involved in. (Diogenes already pointed out that relationships and community are part of it. With some people, they’re the main thing that’s important, and they just don’t worry much about truth or dogma or intellectual matters. With other people, intellectual/theological truth matters very much, it’s just not the only thing that matters.)
Some people just happen upon a particular religion because they happened to grow up in it, or because they have friends in that religion, or because someone invites them, or they encounter it in their reading, or there’s a church just down the street, or whatever. And then they’re not so much choosing among multiple alternatives as deciding whether this particular religion is right (in general/for them) or not.
It happens. I went from an active adult member of an Orthodox Catholic sect to an active member of the ELCA (Lutheran) with little time off in-between. But since I tend to be active in whatever interests me and adds to my life that isn’t a big surprise.
Some religions are (or believe they are) a set of factual claims but many admit that they are more faith and belief than fact. If you personally approach life from the latter point of view, switching one denomination for another isn’t that tough. Your life and experiences show you problems with Belief X that don’t exist with Belief Y so you change - or move or whatever word you want to pick.
Well, its not like people in the US often convert from, say, Christianity to Norse Paganism. I’d imagine nine times out of ten conversions are from one Abrahamic religion to another, so Entity X is the same as Entity Y. And in most cases its probably from one flavor of Christianity to another. So the entity being worshipped, a large chunk of the mythology and a decent share of the dogma are going to stay consistent, and the change either has to do with some point of theology that everyday practitioners probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about anyways (salvation through works vs salvation through faith say), some point about the heirarchy of the Church (married priests vs celebate ones), etc.
But those are both Christian sects, and are more alike than different, aren’t they? The basic tenets of the faith are the same (Jesus was the Son of God, he returned to lead humanity to salvation, there are the Ten Commandments to follow, etc), right?
From my viewpoint, all the Abrahamic religions are more similar than they are different (there is one god, humanity is separate from the earth and was given it to rule over, humanity was wounded in the beginning and is sinful and must take action to restore itself). Converting among those faiths would involve fewer changes than converting to, say, Hinduism.
Have there been cases of people switching from one very different strongly-held faith to another? I’m thinking along the lines of Shintoism to, say, Southern Baptist.
One changes stances on religion in the same manner as one changes stances on anything. One researches, learns new information that one didn’t know before, synthesizes new information into new beliefs, builds a new worldview out of those new beliefs. While the precise details will never be the same for any two people, the outline of the process out to be familiar to anyone who’s participated in intellectual exploration. If some people have trouble imagining how it’s possible, perhaps it because those people have very little experience with intellectual exploration.
In fairness, it can be. It isn’t for me - and I don’t believe it is for most of the atheists on the Dope. But a person who believes something like “the horror and war that pervade our lives are proof that God doesn’t exist”, or “the sex scandals in the Catholic Church have made it impossible to believe in God” has come to atheism via faith.
