Sometimes in order to find the truth, we must be willing to accept that other possibilities outside our current belief system could be true. We often get in our own way. Make a decision to fight against your biases and follow the evidence—wherever it may lead.

I for one agree. But from whence the quotation?

I happened to find it on a Christian blog, Explore God, where it stood somewhat glaringly out of place as a challenge for skeptics to reconsider their position. The blog on the whole seems to contain rather a great deal of amorphous and subjective muddle-mouthing about anything other than honest and objective inquiry.

On my own experience of late, the advice in the quotation seems more typically to be staunchly resisted by the faithful rather than embraced. And yet they/we proffer. And they/we posture. In my own case, I have followed the precept as well as possible. And I can’t help but muse just how badly a dedication to honest inquiry can backfire on the a priori conclusions which the faithful consider acceptable. It certainly backfired on me. At least, that is, on one view. Objectively, it worked precisely the way it should. It demonstrated that my own muddle-mouthing on the subject of faith was without factual basis. In the myth speak of us moderns, the above principle constitutes “the red pill”. And I cannot say that I would trade back for the chance at the blue.

And how many believers can claim to have walked this path? What would be required to support such a claim? One would have to arrive at an adverse conclusion (undesired), contra one’s bias, and on the grounds of objective (not subjective or existential) evidences. No friend or scholar has yet measured up to such criteria. Yet the skeptics do – and they are the ironic and ill-fitted target of this quotation in the first place. We have here a boomerang: an elegantly arcing trajectory that soars outward, finds no target, and returns promptly to the head of its hurler.

Explore God: 40-Day Challenge