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Changing views

22:57 / 21.04.04

Basically it's a simple question: Do you feel that your view of the world, life, reality, whatever, are changing or static? If changing, how much and how fast?
I know I myself have gone from atheist, to newagey buddhist, to fundamentalist monotheist, to my current having no fucking clue in just five or six years. Is this normal, I wonder?

20:36 / 22.04.04

That is pretty dramatic. Are you sure you're not applying labels to yourself a bit too liberally? I find it hard to imagine you could be fully committed to any such point of view for such a short time, such as saying "I am..." would suggest. If you really were, it kinda suggests you entered into each of those worldviews a bit too casually. But I suspect you're exaggerating slightly to make a point.

I would think to have different phases in life where you take a keen interest in different world views is perfectly healthy. And to suspend one's own world view at times perhaps also. I would say my world view is currently somewhat suspended pending further investigation i.e. I could not say "I am..." (obviously I do have a world view, even if it's less coherent than some). I think this is especially true when you're young, or going through key developmental phases in your life.

But really, it totally depends on you. How do these changes fit in with the overall trends in your life? Are you an ideologically restless person generally? I would say I am to a great extent. I would describe a lot of my world view as 'found and foraged'. I tend to take an interest in something and then forget about it for a while and look at something else. But I feel like it's all building up to something. I hope...

I've responded to this as if it were a conversation thread. I can't really see any other way to respond, TBH.

03:21 / 23.04.04

i know that my view of the world changes with every moment i experience. my perspective changes constantly. every minute i change, and i can't control it. i feel that everyone is like this, although, i cannot say for sure due to the fact that i am not in everyone else's perspective.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:32 / 23.04.04

In general terms my worldview has remained largely static for most of my twenties and I'm approaching 28 now. The two biggest shocks to my system were leaving home to go to university at 18, then moving away from home when I got a job at 21. There have been smaller things between and since then but on the whole I've cushioned and integrated them better.

I see it more as a two level thing, the filter that you see the world through, like a special pair of x-ray specs, is the largely static one of middle-class liberal whitey, thinking that racism, sexism and homophobia are bad things. Then behind that is the information that informs that which is updated by things in the world that either challenge my views or bolster them.

I guess being agnostic and sceptical keeps me from following any particular set of beliefs to the point that dropping them would constitute a shattering change.

09:25 / 23.04.04

First of all, I'm only 22, so I guess that soul searching and such at this age isn't out of the ordinary. I just felt that I have been quite wobbly, and I wanted to hear if that was the general trend.

And yes, I was exaggerating. I wasn't a very committed atheist, it was mostly just because it was expected. And my early religiousness gradually developed into monotheism. So I guess there was only one real change.
But my point is, when I really believed in God, I honestly thought that would be me for good. Now, just a few years later, I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe that was just youthful naivete.
Oddly, though I have less of an idea what's true, I feel more settled, so maybe this particular view is in for a longer run.

I'd like to know if anyone has had the experience of changing their world view later in life, say 35-40. I'd imagine that it'd be harder, since you have invested more.

13:23 / 23.04.04

i'm also 22, and when i speak with my older friends (35-40) we always marvel of how, even though we are all in different places in our lives, we still deal with life similarly. even our beliefs are in different areas, but the way the beliefs affect our daily lives is similar.

i'm beginning to understand that life is just a constant learning process: that i will make mistakes, but i can learn from them. mistakes may hurt, but the lesson is what gives value to my life experiences. i have said this so many times before, but it means more to me now. i understand the extent of the idea better, but i know i don't understand it fully. oh, and just because no body ever quotes rilke:

you are so young, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps you will learn then, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner!

i hope this helped. life is good.

13:57 / 23.04.04

I think one's world view is constantly changing in subtle ways as we gather information, but for a lot of people the changes are pretty much imperceptible (often their beliefs have abigger effect on the information they receive than vice versa). There are some people who do have dramatic shifts, and I don't think it's necessarily limited to a specific age group. One person might have a major shift in views in college and then keep those intact, while another changes every ten years, and another hits forty and re-evalutes their priorities and comes out with a new perspective. I don't think one is more healthy than another, we're all just different.

Personally, I like to think of my own world view as a constant work in progress. To go along with runaway's quote: The path is the end in itself, grasshopper. I often find it difficult to actually see my whole world view at once. I develop certain beliefs in certain areas - some are always in flux, while others haven't changed much over time - and I'm certain there are contradictions in my own mind. When I run across two ideas that contradict one another, I usually try to examine them and change one (or sometimes both) so that they agree, but this is not always possible. I am a believer in Paradox, and I don't think the universe operates on a completely logical principle that has a single proper solution. I don't know for sure yet, but I have a suspicion that the entirety of existence is based upon a fundamental contradiction.

15:24 / 23.04.04

My worldviews have pretty much remained static, with a few catastrophic ruptures altering it slightly here and there.

15:47 / 23.04.04

Quartermass, could you elaborate? What changed? When? And why? I'd love to hear it.

And thanks to you all for giving me your input, I really appreciate it.

The Knights Templar Boogie Machine

22:12 / 26.04.04

Robert Anton Wilson speaks of a stage one gets to on the path of self discovery he calls 'I' opening ,Morrison speaks of multiple personality disorder as a lifestyle option and Aleister Crowley forerunner of western neurological goodies enjoyed playing out alter egos and personas....
I think as one grows and develops it is natural to experiment with different ways of perceiving the world through modifying the personality to other cultural symbols and modes of thinking. However, the rest of society who prefer to live in one static map of reality tend to view such individuals as eccentric or insane...
I think its a natural process, but one that surely plays havoc with levels of cognitive dissonance in society...

...

18:02 / 27.04.04

One thing I think has remained fairly constant is my atheism, which has only gotten stronger since I first started questioning religion (my parents were essentially secular and had a hands-off philosophy to religion - I was not baptised, and although I attended a Catholic primary school, it was not for religious reasons). As for politics? Yes, they are. Every month or so I do the Political Compass test in order to see how my views are changing (they're getting more economic-centre and, although stuttering, more socially libertarian). I'm rejecting more of socialism and becoming more skeptical of environmentalism (give me science over the new-agey polemics of Greenpeace et al.).

My views are definitely changing to ones that are based more on fact and logic than ideology. In essence I'm becoming a bitter skeptic. Which is probably no bad thing.

I think that change is essentially a good thing. The world is, however much people decry it, changing. It takes a lot of strength to hold an opinion. It takes even more strength to admit that your opinion has changed, especially when so many people decry such a thing in politicians.

20:41 / 27.04.04

Just to expand on this idea. Could it be possible, and possibly useful, to hold two contradicting views - maybe this calls for some form of social experiment.

Is it healthy to contradict ones self once in a while?

22:03 / 27.04.04

Could it be possible, and possibly useful, to hold two contradicting views - maybe this calls for some form of social experiment.

Is it healthy to contradict ones self once in a while?

IMHO - it's not just possible, it's just human nature.

We like to think of ourselves as having some kind of coherant world view. In reality, it's perfectly reasonable to have contradictory view points. Otherwise the world would be plenty more black and white. It's just a natural response to the complexity of real life.

22:58 / 27.04.04

I think it would probably be very difficult to hold two directly contradictory views, mostly because we are taught that you can't do that. However, I think it is quite normal to hold two views that, if taken to their logical conclusions, really are contradictory. The difference being that we aren't aware that they are contradictory.
On a related note, I have at times encountered ideas that I thought were contradictory, but upon analysis turned out not to be at all.

It seems that most people here give some thought to how they view the world, and are somewhat flexible in their views. Is that the norm in society, or are we just really intelligent and progressive in here?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:55 / 28.04.04

sjhrbr Just to expand on this idea. Could it be possible, and possibly useful, to hold two contradicting views - maybe this calls for some form of social experiment.

Well, I arguably hold contradictory views, I don't believe the state has the right to murder it's citizens and punishment for their crimes and I'm pro-choice, although that is wrapped up in 'We've had too many cases of cases against people being fabricated so an imperfect justice system would kill innocent people which is doubly unacceptible' and I'm more on the side of the woman than the embryo.

But I really didn't think Saddam Hussein was a good leader to his people but I was anti-war, which lead to many uninteresting arguments on blogs...

statisticalpurposes

21:21 / 28.04.04

Could it be possible, and possibly useful, to hold two contradicting views - maybe this calls for some form of social experiment.

In reality, it's perfectly reasonable to have contradictory view points.

A ton of research went into cognitive dissonance theory in the 70's. Though it's not strictly about "two views," I think it's relevant. Basically, if you do something you don't agree with, you'll end up agreeing with it more when you're done doing it. The most famous experiment is the one where they got people to write an essay on something they disagreed with. People that were paid a dollar to do it changed their attitudes towards the subject more than people who were paid $20. The reasoning goes that the well-paid subjects would justify their essay-writing for the profit, while the poorly-paid ones would need to actually change their attitude towards the subject to make everything ok. The rest of the research, as far as I can tell, doesn't make a whole lot more progress from there: It establishes that it depends on the subject and if the "contradiction" can be made salient to the person and if it's something they care about.

20:36 / 29.04.04

I'm only 16, and unlike many of my peers, my world views change constantly. I guess my first blow came when I was 12 or 13 or so and I began to doubt God and finally declared myself an atheist. But after a while I found myself doubting that as well and prefered to call myself an agnostic. Now I'm in a sort of in between place - I really don't know what I believe. I dabble in nihilism, buddhism, determinism, existentialism, postmodernism, and solipsism, but don't believe whole-heartedly in any of them.

On that note...

09:44 / 30.04.04

How much of this thread is a question of what we identify with rather than what we believe? Shifting from religious ideologies such as Atheism to Monotheism suggests an identification from one enormous culturally invested religious label to another. I wouldn't day that this is necessarily a shift in world view more an experimentation with different identities. The only thing that can really determine an underlying world view is when these labels are put to the test in some sort of crisis e.g. if you were put in front a firing squad would you drop to your knees and pray? Otherwise it can just be extremely healthy intellectual/spiritual experimentation. (Apologies to all Spiritualists who belive they have a direct connection with their deity/ies - I don't buy it.)

We no longer have the political imperative to stick to one such label and in a less encompassing way shift labels all the time (I might put on a suit for work and becoming something different from when I'm skating with my friends). These can easily be contradictory I might wear a gap t-shirt at a demonstration against sweatshop exploitation. This could be interpretted as thoughtless and/or contradictory but this is due to the conflict in cultural values that the two labels being performed suggest. (Perhaps this is a bad example) The point is that our society provides us with an (economic?) imperative to shift our identies as often as possible and while this might cause conflicts, everyone is going through it all the time. It just depends on what values we choose to identify with at a given time.

IMO the labels we claim and perform are always mediated by the social milieu we find ourselves in: something must happened to have got you to challenge your monotheistic beliefs even if it was just a news article on TV.

14:18 / 30.04.04

I know I myself have gone from atheist, to newagey buddhist, to fundamentalist monotheist, to my current having no fucking clue in just five or six years. Is this normal, I wonder?

I think that's pretty healthy. Certainty is grim, unforgiving and usually fatal. My view of the world, life, etc. . . goes through endless modification. The only constant has been a desire to dance in the whirlwind.