"Christianity is not based on a historical truth, but presents us with a (historical) narrative & says: now believe! But not, believe this report with the belief that is appropriate to a historical report,—but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life." – Ludwig Wittgenstein

      I want to say this is essential to any world version (belief system, faith, religion, political ideology, etc.) Where “Christianity” is in the passage, you can substitute a variable and make a couple of small changes to make the thought more general:

x is not based on a merely factual truth, but presents us with a narrative or a set of axioms & says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative or these axioms with the belief that is appropriate to ordinary reason (science, court cases), which tests beliefs, confronts counter-evidence, etc.,—but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life.

where x is a world version people live by. 

     For x you can substitute, for example,  any traditional religion and all the variations within particular religions; political philosophies like Marxism or secular humanism in all its forms; various forms of nationalism as well as the kinds of cosmopolitanism; left ideologies that come out of culture & gender studies as well as the belief in the Nietzschean Übermensch (i.e. man beyond good and evil who creates his own values, his own reality); National Socialism as well as the Enlightenment; hedonism, the ruthless pursuit of self-interest – I could go on. x doesn’t have to be an -ism; it can be a purely narcissistic spirituality.  Whatever gives people’s lives meaning in their own minds such that they would sacrifice or do wrong rather than lose it, and losing it would be a personal catastrophe. x is whatever set of convictions that we construct our life around, that condition the way we feel, think, and act. x is the main conscious source of meaning.

    Having an x has become problematic. x typically is a gift – or curse – of culture, depending, something that we take in with our mother’s milk. But to condense a long, complicated story into a simple sentence: capitalism-science-technology – one complex, one regime – has transformed the way human beings live such that traditional cultures have dissolved, or are in the process of dissolving, or sometimes are violently and fanatically (usually in a stupid way) trying to preserve something. 

      Having an x has become problematic. Individual choice increasingly determines what x a person has, and within a single family, there can be several incommensurable x’s. Many people don’t have an x at all, as the regime generates ideologies that have made it increasingly difficult to believe in anything at all, and everything we do believe in is tinged with the suspicion of narcissism or sentimentality – usually, those two defects go together. In a capitalist society, it almost seems like shopping on the marketplace of meaning. The consequence of not having an x is often depression – the clinical term for resignation or despair. There is for many people no answer to the question “Why?” to use Nietzsche’s way of putting it.

   So we need an x and all x has become problematic. My x used to be the Enlightenment. All other possible x’s were in the dock and Reason was the judge. What evidence were they based on? Are the fundamental convictions falsifiable? Are they tautologies that tell us nothing about the world? Are they forms of false consciousness, making our true social situation? It was a comfortable x since in my mind it was not an x but a way of making myself – my Reason – judge of all other x’s. But I didn’t believe it out of complacency; I wanted truth and believed that reason – as the Enlightenment conceived of reason –  was the path to truth. 

     But my Enlightenment was an x. It was something I believed through thick and thin. The conviction that nothing could or  should be considered good, true, or meaningful unless there was sufficient evidence; the belief that believing nothing unless there were sufficient evidence or sound arguments for it was an act of faith: that our puny human reason could know everything there was to know in the same way we can know that the sun rises and that the universe is expanding. There is absolutely no evidence for that, nor could there ever be. That is just as much an unsupported dogma as ‘Jesus is God’ or ‘Hitler is the German Messiah,’ etc.

    ‘Christ rose from the dead.’ Imagine this attitude expressed by a priest during mass: “Since this is an event in history, there must be historical evidence. We have the testimony of the gospels, but there are many reasons to doubt them as historical sources. The Vatican has thus established a commission of the best historians in their field to study the matter and make recommendations.” That is what Wittgenstein thought was absurd. That is a completely different area: history and religion each have their own often overlapping but different agendas, forms of life, conceptions of what make sense, and so on. I cease being a historian when I participate in the Eucharist.

    I want to say: all x’s relate the individual to a transcendence – even and perhaps especially the most worldly who want reality to be nothing more than what our reason and experience says it is. Therefore, the convictions, the narratives that support them are beyond our normal reasoning powers to verify, falsify, or prove. Even convictions that seem to have empirical content – e.g. ‘Christ was crucified and rose from the dead,’‘ or Blacks are natural slaves,’ or ‘Humanity is divided up into essential different and competing races whereas the German race is the natural master race and the Jewish race is the natural parasite,’ or ‘Donald Trump won the election and did not attempt a coup.’ It is a risk to make a belief with some empirical claim the center of an x, but as I tried to explain in my previous entry if a group wants a closed world version, they can also deal with such quasi-empirical beliefs. There are still flat earthers today.

    But in general, most convictions relate us to transcendence and cannot be falsified in principle. Rather than understand such language as deficient factual language I suggest they should be understood in a partly symbolic sense, which is necessary if they are to do their job and connect us to some image of transcendence - i.e. by definition that which is not a fact but which makes it possible to judge facts. (Wittgenstein thinks that such language is in some respects like a picture - say, God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel:

The point is not to give a realistic portrayal of God and Adam, though it using the pictural language of representation. That would reduce the picture to absurdity. The point is to symbolize God's love reaching out to mankind, and it is communicated in 'factual' i.e. representational mode, the same mode as is used to paint real people we know and can compare to representation to. I am saying the language of all possible x's are some like that. And that, therefore, it is a mistake to bring them down to the purely factual and representational level and think you can verify or refute them like that. They are ways of making sense of the world as a whole. (People like Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are thus - as I was earlier in my life - completely off base when they think that science has anything to do with it.)

   That is not to say x's  cannot make contact with reality. Indeed, they must make contact with reality if they are to function as an x. For me, amidst all the stupidities, confusions, selfish acts, and failures of my life, what I cling to is what I have experienced as more or less pure, purely good; my love and care for my children, for my family, for the inner life of the mind (i.e. love of truth), and thus for the open society necessary for the inner life of the mind to thrive. These experiences are the soil from which my x grows and indeed judges me. Wittgenstein ended the passage I quoted at the beginning with these words: “…believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life.” In other words, as I from day to day try to be a decent father – among other things – my convictions are either strengthened or weakened. I think our lives are the tests of our convictions.

    Now we know people connect their x to life experiences in different ways. Pathological narcissists will make their world version reflect the most gratifying self-image they have of themselves; traumatized people full of hatred might make destroying an enemy the central purpose of their lives. Etc. Now my life is not free of narcissism or hatred – well, more indifference as a form of contempt – as others. But I strive not to allow these to be the source of what gives my life meaning – not to feel superior to those that don’t (‘Judge not lest you yourself be judged’ is such a liberating conviction that is central for me and my x; I don’t always follow it, but I criticize myself or even feel remorse when I don’t). ‘Love what is good’ – part of my x. The conscious beliefs of an x – like Naziism – often mirror some spiritual poison, but this will only be visible from the perspective of love, invisible otherwise. I am grateful to all the things in my life that prevented such hatred from taking deep root in me – my parents above all, and grandparents.

     This is the level where world versions make contact with reality, and this is the level where you have to confront them. Not with intellectual arguments, at least in the first place.