Be physically fit and healthy

The key insight you should be taking from this is that "beliefs" aren't what you think they are, and don't do what you think they do.

The brain's job isn't to discern true beliefs, or uncover the secrets of the universe. That's left-liberal-rationalist propaganda just as self serving as the religious kind. The brain is trying to get you fed, housed, laid, and within a strong coalition that can stand up to outside pressure, and in its bag of tricks it has an old but incredibly effective tool: Sacredness.

Not religion, although sacredness encompasses all religious thinking, and you can call it that if you want to piss off progressives. Sacredness is the social feeling that some values are special values, above appraisal and trading for mundane things like food, shelter, and sex. Human life is a common one, and laypeople often feel that no price is too high to save a life, even though every minor politician and bureaucrat who has to make these kinds of decisions has a number between one and seven million that determines how much they're willing to spend on prospective lifesaving measures. If you want to see a high-sacredness social movement that's completely secular, look at SJWs. Diversity is worth any cost, any who blaspheme against LGBTs must be burned at the stake, constant infighting over who is the truest, purest adherent to Intersectionality. Sound familiar?

The trouble is, there are a lot of necessary cues from your social group for whether something is sacred and should be treated as such, and you can't make all your shared values sacred values organically, with everyone on the same page. Unless…

What if you taped together everything good that brought you and your tribe closer together in friendship, trust, and cooperation, and gave it a name? You'd call it "God", and heap all your ritual, reverence, and excstatic outbursts onto it, and catch all those good values He represents in the Sacredness Splash Zone.

Your brain facilitates this beneficial process by making you gullible and accepting when you're in the presence of Awe, the principal feeling relating to sacredness, unless your preexisting tribal mythology that includes Atheism as a sacred value (you can tell it's sacred because you're hesitent to trade it away for even overwhelming material benefits) balks at it as Not My Tribe.

So, my advice to you is: You look at mormons and see something that's working, an iternation on a social model that has worked for a long time in the past (christianity), and you want in. Understand that in order to live among Mormons, you must become one. Give up your "beliefs" that don't pay rent, that haven't gotten you friendships or sex or money. Go to a Mormon center and confess that you feel like there's something missing in your life, but you don't know what it is. Let him convince you. Let it come naturally. If you can swallow a few camels at the beginning, skilled theologians can strain out all the flies and make the Mormon worldview make just as much intuitive sense to you as the atheistic one does.

Good luck, and godspeed.

We should do this. If we can bring grills into the fold we can all bust our cherries.

You smart. I lik you

See the issue is that acceptance of any idea isn't a choice. You have to be convinced. The saying "ignorance is bliss" exists because sometimes it would be nice to believe something, but once you understand the situation, you can no longer believe that thing, you have been given information that makes being convinced of that thing highly unlikely. Even if we accept that theism and mormonism are useful beliefs, it will probably be hard if not impossible for OP to actually believe it, because he already understands the idea of using logic and evidence before believing something.

not an argument for why 3DPD can be waifus

It's always a struggle to change your tribal affiliation. If the beliefs that underpin the worldview could be so easily changed, they wouldn't be reliable enough to base a social organization on.

That said, you're making a mistake if you think this is a one-way process from religion, tribal, less enlightened -> athiestic, atomized, more enlightened. The brain doesn't care about truth.

If you're a podunk hillbilly in a crumbling community and see a lot of smart people with respect and money and power talking about how God is dead an there's no moral foundation for anything, you'll slowly be ground down until their beliefs are natural to you. It hurts because being a loser hurts, and if your tribe is shitty and theirs is doing great, there's nothing else to call you.

Meanwhile, if you surround yourself with kind, hard-working, honest and intelligent Mormons, who are better friends and romantic prospects than any of the soulless, bitchy hipsters of your college town and can intelligently address the religious questions that made your hillbilly parents go slackjawed and possibly beat you with their belt, your brain will get the message. It's not going to be easy or comfortable, but it'll work.

Not saying that, but I am saying that once you are convinced that evidence and logic are necessary for believing something, it's difficult to be convinced otherwise, because those arguments will not include evidence and logic. You may argue that it would be nice and useful to believe other things, but that is not the same as actually arguing that those things are true. That's the thing, you're not actually arguing that mormonism is true.

The brain is easily tricked, yes, but as you've said in other words, it can be hard to change your ideas, and some ideas are harder to change than others. Religion is hard to change, as you've pointed out, due to many psychological factors. It's also hard to change ideas that are actually true and well understood, because you have actual infallible arguments for why those ideas are true (because they actually are true. If they're wrong, then your arguments can be dismantled and you can be made to change your mind). You may wish you believed something else, perhaps for pragmatic psychological and social reasons, but you understand why your ideas are true, and you can't unlearn that knowledge.

Well see this is the other thing. They can't. I get mormons, jehovah's witnesses, etc, coming to my house every weekend, and I actually indulge them every weekend. But they never can answer my questions. If they actually have any proof, then maybe one day I'll hear it, but instead what I always hear is that you have to have "faith," which is basically just believing something without evidence, and I already understand why evidence is useful for believing things, so that argument doesn't work on me. It might be nice if I was mormon, but I already understand the arguments for why dinosaurs aren't some sort of made up hoax, so it's gonna be hard to convince me otherwise. It's gonna be hard to convince me of magic underwear and wizards who created the universe when you have less evidence for them than you do for the dinosaurs you claim never existed.

There's a chance that Liberal/Democratic/Leftist communities aren't unsatisfying enough where you are to foster the right changes. Religious conversions usually come after either significant exposure or high stress and ennui. If you're socially invested in groups that you value, and those groups are incompatible with Mormonism, you're going to recoil from it. It's not something you can trick yourself into, either the conditions become right to loosen your self-identification or they don't and it won't appeal to you.

If OP is a foreveralone wasting away in an apartment somewhere, exposure to something better is going to push some subconscious levers and the faith will come naturally, without needing to be explained, in the same way you don't feel the need to personally verify every scientific article you take as fact and will often take the word of someone you sufficiently trust to be correct. That's what faith is, fundamentally: The ability to trust your peers and superiors with write access to your head. If the social group isn't up to snuff, or you already have one that's doing an adequate job, there's no slack to make a big change with.

Big Brother, is that you?

OP, have you ever read Myth of Sysiphus? You sound just like the absurd man he describes. You long for unity in this world, but you understand that there isn't one: the world and your desires aren't in the same page. And if one is to escape the absurd, one must either kill himself or give up rationality. Since you don't want to give up logical thinking, you can't escape the absurd: your only option is to survive being in the absurd. It is possible, but it's conclusion isn't the "life is perfect" you came looking for; it's conclusion is more like "life is a bitch, but that's ok". You should really read this essay.

Naw. Your argument is basically that being surrounded by SJWs will make me believe in magic.

You fundamentally misunderstand what science is. Yes, we all accept things we have not personally verified, even if simply due to lack of time, but scientists will never tell you to believe something. They'll say "check out what I did and what it implies. Here's how you can try it and see for yourself." It's very different from just being told to listen and believe.

Well, they claim to believe bizarre shit. I don't want to delve further than that in hopes that they're just:

Pure casuitry. This is a clever way of selling: monkey see, monkey do.

Post Mormon qts

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