Well, that's some of it. But theology is still pretty much conceptual systematic thought -- a bunch of philosophical statements that you can test for inherent consistency as well as try to connect up with real-life data to test the ideas.
True. In the past, if you had enough money to choose whatever life you wanted, and you were super-smart, then you studied theology, as it was considered the most intellectually challenging of any subject. Today, you don't need to think. You can just go on Youtube, and watch someone tell you what to think.
It's also sometimes a personally relevant topic, if one is being repressed by proponents of a particular system.
I remember that in the 70s and the 80s, there was a big problem with secular schools in the UK, that many highly intelligent people were failing school. They had the problem that they were being taught secular subjects like science and maths, but were being discouraged from challenging their teachers. So a lot of secular people started sending their kids to religious schools, because it was the only place where such kids would do well. Today, it's not a problem, because almost no-one even questions what they were taught anymore, not until they are MUCH older, and way out of school.
My experience was that I was raised within the church, not outside of it, and so I believed as my natural initial stage. It was only when I was finally able to get out of the subculture and truly start examining other frameworks for how the world worked that I was able to properly critique my starting stances.
Interesting, because almost everyone I know, who grew up in the UK, which is a very secular country, and who reached late 30s onwards, has either expressed that we were lied to by secular society about everything, and are very angry, or say that secular society is a farce, and you just have to get on with life.
I find it very interesting that the way that you talk about your experiences within a religious church in religious America, was exactly how many highly-intelligent people felt, growing up in secular education in secular Britain. It's almost as if your experiences are independent of religions or secularity, and are dependent on whether you were questioning the ideological and educational systems that your government was reliant on, to breed unquestioning loyalty and trust.
It wasn't that I wasn't testing these ideas, I was constantly testing -- it was just that my information flow (and my initial assumptions) was extremely limited until I got out of the subculture. (I did not have the Internet growing up, so geography was much more relevant in terms of idea flow and access than it is today.)
I didn't have the internet growing up. I remember when I was 3, wondering how the Tooth Fairy managed to carry the right currently for my country, and decided to carry out a few experiments to see if my family were pretending to be the Tooth Fairy. One can make similar Ti-inconsistent observations about Santa Claus and carry out experiments without informing anyone, to test it, at a very young age. Information flow doesn't stop you testing many things. But it can lead to lack of exposure of someone else giving you an Ne idea of what to test. But then, you become dependent on them handing you ideas. They can then select to control the flow and presentation of information, to be that which will lead you to certain ways of thinking, that will encourage you to reach the conclusions they would desire you to believe. British leaders and civil servants were quite expert in this, having honed that skill over the last 2,000 years, and likely longer. American leaders and British leaders were from the same people, often are related, such as Bush, Clinton, Obama, and the British Royal Family, and often shared information with each other, like Bletchley Park shared the info they got from cracking Enigma codes with the American military intelligence.
Information access/flow is a big deal, and that's where I think Si plays into things. INTPs might assume their initial state as the truth/baseline, but the reality is that it's potentially just one interpretation of data and even missing a lot of data so as to not be representative of the macrocosm... in other words, it's a poor model of actual reality.
Exactly. In my teens and 20s, half my ideas were spot on, and half were completely ridiculous "castles in the air". Eventually, I noticed that whenever I was contradicted, it was usually because of some Se observation about reality, that was ubiquitous and seen by everyone but me. Eventually, I learned that if I checked my general experience of reality with Ne, I could mostly detect which of my theories were spot on, and which were totally ridiculous. Made my ideas really strong. But then, once I started doing this, I started checking scientific theories and general societal values my general experience of reality as well, and they often didn't match.
