Inside the Box—Cognitive Dissonance of Faith

In 1942, Albert Einstein just gave an exam to his senior class of physics students. His assistant asked him, “isn’t that exactly the same exam you gave to exactly the same class one year ago?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Einstein, “it’s exactly the same.”

“But Dr Einstein, how could you possibly do that?”, the assistant said.

“Well,” said Einstein, “the answers have changed.”

What each of us knows today will be replaced with a more accurate truth in the future. These incremental steps toward a firmer reality are often called “science changing its mind”. It is true, but it is also called improvement towards a more correct answer.

Now in business, according to the data, approximately 3% of people are inclined to even do different things outside the box when what they’ve been doing fails them. The remaining 97% continues to smash into the wall, trying to get different results by doing more or less of the same thing. Using the same answers in a recycled failure.

—Enter religion

Rewording, revisiting, attempting to replace the failed with an even older version of what has failed complete civilizations is the Christian way. Ontology was a guess, and it’s reworks and investigations are guesses as to what the guesses meant. And now as it turns out, in the years immediately after the CE began, there was no beginning truth. Only a con man named Paul who introduced his own gospel based on a character that is fictional. Which, btw, is a masterful stroke on basic human psychology. Less fact equals more faith, and zero fact equals great faith—the pride associated with mere belief is a cognitive dissonance dream come true. Belief is an untouchable sacredity for the common people when belief is all the knowledge they can muster, and will then defend a falsehood to the death over pride.