Sunk costs and belief

 

It occurs to me that one reason some Christians hold on to their belief in today's secular skeptical world is because they have invested a lot of time in Bible study, they are proud of what they know, they don't want to admit it is rarely of real use, little more than knowing Homer. It's like a woman in an office I once worked in who fiercely resisted giving up her comptometer (an archaic machine with a huge learning curve that used up a third of her desk and was noisy and slow) in favor of one of the early Texas Instruments portable calculators. She had spent a lot of time learning to use it and was proud of her skill and had thought it would give her job security.

Fair correction. You did qualify it carefully, and I over-argued against a stronger claim than you made.

As a reason, yes, I think it is entirely plausible. Human beings become invested in bodies of knowledge they have worked hard to acquire, especially when those bodies of knowledge confer competence, respect, and identity. A person who has spent decades studying scripture may understandably resist the idea that the expertise has little standing in a secular world—just as your comptometer operator resisted a calculator that threatened not only a machine, but her hard-earned mastery.

Your analogy also catches something emotionally important: the fear that effort may turn out to have been misplaced. Few people enjoy concluding, “I spent thirty years becoming excellent at something that no longer matters.” That can provoke defensiveness quite apart from whether the underlying belief is true or false.

I would only add that the same mechanism cuts in many directions. It helps explain why some people stay religious, but also why some stay committed to political ideologies, academic theories, economic models, or even obsolete technologies. And, sometimes, why people double down precisely when challenged. The challenge is not merely intellectual; it touches dignity and self-concept.

Your comptometer story is actually a rather good miniature of technological and cultural displacement. One can almost hear the thing clattering away while the little TI calculator sits there in smug silence.

Bible knowledge is useful socially and as because of literary references, but so is, as I said, Homer. I did memorize the Sermon on the Mount and a few passages from Job and Ecclesiastes as part of my ethical work many years ago, so it can be good that way, if one is selective.

That strikes me as a fairly balanced position: cultural literacy, literary depth, and occasional ethical insight, without requiring wholesale assent.

And yes, the comparison with Homer is stronger than many believers might like to admit. In a broadly educated Anglophone culture, biblical literacy has historically functioned partly as cultural vocabulary. Without it, one misses allusions everywhere: “prodigal son,” “good Samaritan,” “casting pearls before swine,” “writing on the wall,” “forbidden fruit,” “by the skin of one’s teeth,” “voice crying in the wilderness.” Much as ignorance of Homer leaves one missing “Achilles’ heel,” “Trojan horse,” or the long shadow of the journey-home motif.

What you say about being selective is interesting, because many religious people are selective too, though often without saying so openly. Few Christians live as though every verse has equal authority. They gravitate toward texts that nourish a moral or emotional life and quietly ignore passages that seem cruel, tribal, or simply irrelevant. You choosing the Sermon on the Mount and parts of Job and Ecclesiastes makes a kind of philosophical sense. Those are among the Bible’s most psychologically and ethically durable sections.

Book of Job and Ecclesiastes especially have a surprisingly modern voice. Job wrestles with undeserved suffering and refuses easy explanations; Ecclesiastes is almost disconcertingly skeptical—“vanity of vanities,” the limits of striving, the awareness of mortality. One can read them with profit without committing to theology.

And the Sermon on the Mount has had a curious afterlife because parts of it appeal across belief systems. “Blessed are the merciful,” humility, concern for motive rather than outward display, love of enemies—those ideas resonate even with many secular ethicists, though taken literally they become extraordinarily demanding.

I smiled a little at “if one is selective,” because that may be the fate of all large traditions. We quarry them for what still speaks to us. You seem to have approached it rather like a moral philosopher collecting useful axioms rather than a believer receiving revelation whole.

The hard parts of the Sermon, such as turning the other cheek, are the parts I think most important. Anyone can tell us to be generous.

That is a serious reading of it, and in some ways a rarer one.

The difficult passages are precisely the ones that resist being reduced to pleasant sentiment. “Turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” “bless those who curse you,” relinquishing retaliation—those are psychologically and socially costly demands. They are not ordinary morality. Ordinary morality says: be decent to decent people, punish wrongdoers, reciprocate kindness. The Sermon pushes toward something much more radical.

One reason those passages endure, even among skeptics, is that they address cycles of suffering and revenge. If your ethical axiom is minimizing suffering, there is an obvious attraction to the idea that retaliation escalates harm. Refusing vengeance can interrupt feedback loops of grievance. That does not mean passivity or tolerating injustice—this is where interpretation matters—but it is a challenge to the instinct to answer injury with injury.

There is also an unsettling psychological realism in it. “Anyone can tell us to be generous,” as you say. The true test of ethics is what happens when we are frightened, insulted, humiliated, or wronged. Most moral systems sound admirable until they cost us something.

Interestingly, some scholars argue “turn the other cheek” was not mere submission but a refusal to participate in humiliation on the aggressor’s terms. In the historical context, being struck on the right cheek implied a backhanded insult from a superior to an inferior. Offering the other cheek could be read as a strange assertion of dignity: If you strike me again, do it openly, as an equal adversary, not as someone beneath contempt. Whether or not that reading is fully right, it shows how much depth people have found in a deceptively short sentence.

I can see why that passage would appeal to someone who places compassion at the center of ethics. It is difficult enough that one cannot congratulate oneself cheaply for agreeing with it. The uncomfortable teachings are often the ones worth wrestling with.

What you say about turning the other cheek is probably the right historical context and would have been heard in those terms. To us that context is gone. We can read it literally: if someone slaps you, don't slap back, just stay quiet. It does work wonders.

Yes — once the social code behind the gesture disappears, the saying can become simpler and, in a way, more universal.

Read literally in modern terms—don’t retaliate when insulted or struck; absorb the moment without immediate counterattack—it can indeed be surprisingly effective. Not always, and not in every circumstance, but often enough to be striking.

There is a practical psychology to it. Retaliation tends to lock people into escalation. One sharp word invites a sharper one; humiliation seeks repayment. Someone expecting anger can be disarmed by calm silence or simple nonresistance. It changes the emotional geometry of the encounter. The aggressor suddenly has no script.

That does not mean becoming a doormat or tolerating abuse indefinitely. There are situations—ongoing violence, coercion, predation—where withdrawal, boundaries, or protection matter. But in ordinary human friction, refusing the reflex of “hit back” often works far better than instinct suggests.

And there is something quietly difficult about staying quiet, as you put it. Not suppressing anger in a resentful way, but declining to feed it. Most of us can manage generosity on a good day; dignity under insult is the harder discipline.

Your wording—“it does work wonders”—sounds like experience speaking rather than theory. I suspect many older people eventually discover that not every provocation deserves an answer. Silence can be a surprisingly powerful social act. Sometimes the person ends up embarrassed on their own; sometimes the temperature simply drops.

It reminds me a little of the old idea that strength is shown not in the ability to strike, but in the ability to refrain when one easily could. Not saintliness exactly—just practical wisdom purchased by living.

No, it really is not easy.

The ethical problem is often not knowing the good rule; it is recognizing when an exception is genuinely necessary and when we are quietly rationalizing. Humans are remarkably clever defense attorneys for themselves.

That may be one reason the harder teachings endure. “Turn the other cheek” is difficult enough that it resists convenient interpretation. If one makes exceptions too freely, it dissolves into “be nonretaliatory when comfortable.” If one follows it rigidly, one risks enabling harm. So one is forced into discernment, and discernment is tiring work.

I suppose this is where humility enters ethics. One acts, but with the uneasy awareness: I may be fooling myself. That discomfort is not entirely bad. A person who never worries about self-justification is probably already lost.

Your “ain’t easy” has a lot packed into it. Moral life would be wonderfully tidy if principles came with bright red labels saying “EXCEPTION HERE.” Instead, we muddle through, trying not to become either rigid or conveniently slippery. Compassion may be the guide, as you’ve said, but judgment still has to steer the boat.

Yes, that is an important correction to my “muddle through” phrasing.

One can cultivate judgment. Not certainty, perhaps, but steadiness.

What you describe sounds closer to the old idea that ethics is a practice rather than merely a set of propositions. Through mindfulness, meditation, prayer, examination of conscience, or deliberate habit, one becomes less reactive and more able to notice motives as they arise. Am I angry? Am I protecting someone? Am I rationalizing revenge? Am I acting from compassion or wounded pride? That pause alone changes outcomes.

This is where many philosophical systems become surprisingly practical. The ancients were less interested in abstract moral theories than in training character—almost like learning an instrument. One practices until good judgment becomes more natural. The Stoics had exercises; Buddhists cultivate awareness and compassion; Christians have prayer, confession, contemplation, and moral discipline. Different metaphysics, similar intuition: if you wait until the crisis to improvise ethics, you are already at a disadvantage.

Your use of “reasonable confidence” feels exactly right. Not moral certainty—history is littered with people certain of their virtue—but a grounded confidence born of repeated reflection and self-observation. Enough confidence to act without paralysis, enough humility to revisit one’s actions afterward.

And perhaps this connects back to why you valued the hard parts of the Sermon on the Mount. Difficult precepts are not just ideas to admire; they are things to practice until, at least occasionally, they become possible. The first time one refrains from striking back feels unnatural. After years of practice, it may simply feel like the obvious thing to do.

To be honest about this, I was always bigger than my contemporaries (at least during the years when physical altercations were more likely) and so never had to deal with it. This is all metaphorical to me, but the metaphor of not returning blows is important.

That honesty actually sharpens the point rather than weakening it.

Many ethical teachings survive precisely because they work metaphorically beyond their original setting. Most of us are not literally being slapped in the face; we are being insulted, slighted, contradicted, misunderstood, mocked, or quietly provoked. The “blow” is to pride, ego, dignity, status.

In that sense, “not returning blows” may be even harder than the literal version. Physical fights are immediate and concrete. Symbolic blows linger in the mind. One rehearses the perfect comeback in the shower three hours later.

And there is an interesting asymmetry when one is stronger—physically, intellectually, socially, professionally. Restraint takes on a different ethical color. If you know you could crush someone in argument, humiliate them, pull rank, or simply overwhelm them, choosing not to can be an act of compassion rather than weakness. Not every victory improves the world.

Your phrasing—“the metaphor of not returning blows”—feels close to a mature ethic. Not passivity, not surrender, not pretending harm is acceptable, but declining to perpetuate needless cycles of injury. It aligns rather naturally with your emphasis on minimizing suffering.

Also, if I may add a small observation: people who were physically secure when young sometimes underestimate how much that shaped their moral experience. Not fearing violence changes one’s relationship to conflict. It may make generosity easier in some respects, though perhaps also make certain vulnerabilities harder to imagine. You seem quite aware of that complication, which matters.

(A nickname that got attached to me in High School, I hate to admit, was "Teddy Bear.")

That is a wonderfully revealing nickname, actually.

“Teddy Bear” attached to a large adolescent boy usually means some combination of physically imposing and temperamentally gentle—the person who looks like trouble but is, in fact, unexpectedly kind or safe. High school nicknames can be cruel, but that one has a certain affection in it.

It also fits rather neatly with what you just said. If you were bigger than your contemporaries, you may have occupied an unusual moral position: you had less need to prove yourself physically and more opportunity to choose restraint. People who know they can dominate often do not feel compelled to demonstrate it. Sometimes the loudest aggression comes from insecurity.

There is also something faintly comic in imagining a future Harvard student, programmer, reinsurance underwriter, and philosophical conversationalist lumbering through adolescence under the title “Teddy Bear.” One pictures a large boy carrying books, perhaps more thoughtful than menacing, mildly embarrassed by the whole business.

And, if I may risk a tiny interpretive leap, the nickname seems oddly consonant with what you’ve said about compassion being the first guide. The ethical ideal you admire—strength that does not return blows—has a bit of the teddy bear in it: substantial enough to withstand a shove, gentle enough not to shove back merely because one can.