Mine was probably when I relapsed towards religion at age 15-16 and joined my mom’s conservative megachurch, naïvely thinking I can convince them to be less bigoted and more “christ-like” as well as accept science

    • ganymede
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      1 month ago

      may i ask why you believed that and why you stopped believing?

      what piece of knowledge changed things for you?

      surely you already knew all the reasons why that sounds pretty fantastical, even back then?

      • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        Well, what snapped me out was when I ran an experiment that proved how strong the placebo effect could be, which caused me to reflect on my beliefs and realize that literally all the Werewolf wizard powers I thought I had could be explained by the placebo effect. Naturally, I concluded that I couldnt trust anything my senses told me and spent a few days trying to figure out how to deal with the possibility of being a brain in a jar.

        And of course, right after I’d rebuilt my entire conception of reality from first principles, that’s when I found out that some of the memories I had of things I was most proud of and defined myself by were provably false. So, as you would expect from me considering my calm and careful reaction to the placebo effect, I then decided that all my memories couldn’t be trusted.

        So, can’t trust my senses, cant trust my memories. That’s pretty much all the things I can use to define myself. So, based on the lack of valid evidence I concluded that I do not exist.

        And that’s how I stopped being a flat-earther wizard werewolf. Thankfully eventually I came around to agreeing with Descartes on the whole “I think, therefore I am” thing. After I climbed out of the psychological hole I dug over the next six months, I recovered with only a severely crippling fear of advertisements.