Religious Convictions

At least twice this year, I have found myself wanting to talk about having a religious conviction that something was the case. The first time of these two that I remember, I had a conviction that a late-Autumn swim in a cold lake would cure something in me that was ailing - and it did. It was fantastic. Not like regular swimming at all. It was spiritual swimming.

Then, just a moment ago, I wanted to talk about the religious conviction I had and have in my ability to build a deep, comprehensive, insightful theory of <the nonsense I'm currently enamored with /> (which wasn't sociosexuality or petrology, if you're reading this from after 2018).

I have a religious conviction that most or all of the pieces are there for me to put together. I have a religious conviction, not that problems must be soluble, but that the solutions happen to be here with me, some assembly required.

— Postinfarction (@postinfarction) December 31, 2018

This is a little odd for me because I'm not religious. I'm not terribly far from being religious, but still, I'd like to find a different way to describe this significant thing that I occasionally feel.

At first, I was reminded of the old Roman distinction between religion and superstition, and I asked myself, "Does a religious conviction feel different from a superstitious conviction?". Well, I don't have superstitious convictions, so, yes, I think superstitious convictions must either feel different or not exist. Moving on to more productive territory, let's try a big list of guesses, as is my usual form:

1. An intuition is a belief you can't justify or abandon. A religious conviction might simply be a very confident intuition.
2. A religious conviction is a belief about how the world properly interfaces with your soul. // Like how a swim can cure something in you that's upstream of your mood, or how, if my second religious conviction is/was right, you can aggressively stalk a fleeting idea through google scholar for a few months and eventually capture some deep and life-changing insight.
3. A religious conviction is a belief that's accompanied by a suspicion which tells you that you believe the thing mostly because it's beautiful or cool or awe-inspiring. // Believing things because of their emotional impact is one of the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally that I tried to enumerate here. Some of the other guesses here will also be based on the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally (HUCBAWRCs?).
4. A religious conviction is a belief that you feel was sneakily communicated to you by someone who knows what's going on behind the scenes. // Say it with me now: HUCBAWRC!
5. A religious conviction is a belief in a narrative explanation of something in your life, even when a narrative explanation should feel unsuitable because you know that the thing isn't determined by the interactions of people. // Can I get a HUCBAWRC? No! This one wasn't on the list. Maybe it should have been? Not too shabby.
6. A religious conviction is just a sacred belief - sacredness recognition being a shared social adaptation for not talking about beliefs that are strategically adopted in an epistemically irrational way. // Is this a HUCBAWRC? But of course! Yet another a HUCBAWRC! Also, when I first wrote this out, I accidentally typed "religious suspicion" rather than conviction. That's a whole new can of worms, isn't it? It will stay unopened for tonight.
7. A religious conviction is a belief that you hold on the basis of non-verbal encouragement from a certain part of you - a part of you which knows just what you need to do in order to flourish and find eudaimonia - a part of you which would readily guide you by detailed instructions if it possessed any linguistic faculty of expression. // Wow. What? That is not a HUCBAWRC. Is that a new hypothesis and/or dumb micro-fiction? I'll tell you! That's some recent conceptual machinery: "the unconscious mind attributed with undue personhood and wisdom" is one of the Proposed Naturalistic Identifications Of The Soul (PNIOTS! I said and you can't stop me.).
8. A religious conviction is a regular conviction felt on a night when you want to be better friends with people who also have god-shaped holes in their hearts. // D'aww?

As is the custom, I will probably add a few more guesses to the list over the next few days, and then never explicitly decide among them. Maybe I could summarize them though? That's the normal format for presenting ideas. Let's try a summary. A religious conviction is 1. A confident intuition. 2. A belief about your world-soul interface. 3. A belief which you want to have in something beautiful. 4. A gnostic belief of natural order. 5. A narrative explanation applied in an inappropriate context. 6. A strategic lie protected by a sacred taboo. 7. Encouragement from your unconscious MINDSOUL. 8. Just a regular conviction, Preinfarction. Just a regular conviction.

Nice. Actually, they feel much less persuasive in summary. Hopefully, any further guesses I make will be better.