There is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer. I thought I'd share this quote which bears on JW issues in an interesting way:
"Do people know what their religious concepts are? This may seem an absurd question in the psychology of religion, whose true answer is probably in the negative. In most domains of mental activity, only a small part of what goes on in our brains is accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, we constantly produce grammatical sentences in our native tongue with impeccable pronunciation, often without any idea how this is done. Or we perceive the world around us as made up of three-dimensional objects, but we are certainly not aware of the ways in which our visual cortex transforms two retinal images into this rick imrpession of solid objects out there. The same goes for all our concepts and norms. We have some notion of what they are, but we certainly do not have full access to the way our minds create and sustain them. Most of the relevant mental machinery that sustains religious concepts is not consciously accessible.
"People's explicitly held, consciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant processes. Indeed, experimental tests show that people's actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theologies, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of people's beliefs. For instance, psychologist Justin Barrett showed that Christians' concept of God was much more complex than the believers themselves assumed. Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people's thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as 'their belief'. In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe."
By itself this is really interesting because we rarely question whether we really think about beliefs the same way we talk about them. But I thought this is interesting too from a JW point of view. The Society demands so much on the flock to accept their contradictory and incoherent doctrine unquestionably, and most consciously put on a veneer of doctrinal unity, but what is really going on in all those little minds? I'm sure many have no clue what certain obscure, arbitrary doctrines are supposed to be, while other doctrines are privately rejected in favor of "personal understandings" that make much more sense to the believer. I never could, for instance, reconcile the teaching on the resurrection with the teaching on the soul, and so I privately made up my own doctrine to harmonize things in my mind. But what the article points out is that even what we think we believe, even if we consciously try to reconcile things in our mind, can contradict the real beliefs hidden in our assumptions. So for instance, many JWs say they don't believe in an immortal soul, I bet these same people can subtly reveal in similar experimental tasks that their beliefs about selfhood and their resurrection in a paradise earth presuppose an unstated belief of continuity of self which the explicit doctrine denies. I was consciously aware of this problem myself (from age 7!), and so I tried to rationalize it by believing that my life force (spirit) goes back to God for safekeeping and he creates a new body in the resurrection and restores the spirit. I wonder how many witnesses are not consciously aware of the problem but in their thinking processes presuppose a state of affairs that actually contradicts what they describe themselves as believing.