When
Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor and I (Jim Myers) met, we were congregation leaders of two
mutually exclusive monotheistic religions – Judaism
and Christianity. We were separated by an unbridgeable belief gap. A person
must either practice Judaism or Christianity – but not both. We wanted to learn how that gap developed, because we
knew that both of our religions began as sects of another religion – Late Second Temple Period Judaism. We
soon discovered that before Late Second
Temple Period Judaism there were First
Temple Israelite Religions and after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70
CE Judaism and Christianity separated and followed very different paths.
The
primary challenge facing Christians and Jews -- as well as members of other
religions, agnostics and atheists -- is not a lack of information about our
histories. The primary challenge is getting
new information past barriers created by our brains.
Living
in the Information Age provides us
with more information about the human brain than any previous generation in
history – and this gives us a distinct
advantage. Below is a quick overview of some things you need to be aware of
about your brain:
The brain is a
belief engine. . . Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into
meaningful patterns that explain why things happen . . . Once beliefs are
formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support
of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the
beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and
round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.1
This
is what your brain is doing right now as you read my words:
● Feedback loops of “belief confirmation” are
searching through my words for confirmatory evidence to support your most
trusted beliefs.
● It is reformatting, revising and screening out things
in my words that disagree with your beliefs.
● It does these things at the subconscious level and
you are completely unaware of the process.
The primary challenge
we all face is getting new information past our brain’s attempts to change,
revise or screen things out of it. We will tell you much more about this
process in future studies, but a good way to begin developing the skills you
will need to override that process is to interact and study with a small group
that includes people with different beliefs.
This
is what I have been doing with Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor, Dr. Ike Tennison, my
friends at Mabank an others for many years. Even though I am unaware of what my
subconscious brain is doing, someone else will be able to see it because they
have different beliefs and life experiences. I created the following guideline for
participants in our meetings and each participant agrees to follow it.
My Reality will be large enough to include all of
the Facts,
it will be open enough to be examined,
and it will be flexible enough to change when errors
or new facts are discovered.
This
is a key factor in creating open safe environments in which people feel
safe enough to ask those questions they would never dare ask in church or
synagogue. Agreeing to follow the
guideline gives participants permission to ask those questions about my beliefs
and gives me permission to ask questions about their beliefs. It creates Belief Transparency in our
group.
As
people interact with each other by using this guideline, an amazing thing
happens. Instead of arguing about beliefs, they become members of a team working
together to identify the origins of their beliefs and track the ways those
beliefs evolved over time. Everyone’s reality will change. It is through this
process that new relationships are created and strengthened. Our goal is not to
“resolve” belief conflicts – it is to transform belief conflicts into
relationship building opportunities.
1
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God
to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as
Truths
(by Michael Shermer book p. 5).
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