Why Practice Autonomist Faith?

Even if you aren't certain about Autonomist beliefs, you could still use them to formulate similar beliefs and then begin practicing them. That is because the tenet of this faith empowers autonomous souls, and encourages them to empower each other, and you are an autonomous soul.

Some may argue that the controversial or uncertain aspects of Autonomist faith amount to a strong enough reason to not hold or practice Autonomist beliefs.

There are several reasons to formulate, adopt and practice beliefs. One of those reasons could be that someone is so certain about their understanding of a belief that they have established routine practice of the belief, by sheer nature of its reliable success. For such a person, this belief has been proven and demonstrated so many times that even if they didn't know everything about how or why it worked, they would still believe in it because it has produced extremely reliable results. Let this be the "certainty justification", but since it is certainty based only on previous experience rather than on vigorous verification process, we will differentiate and call it the "weak" certainty justification.

There are other reasons you could choose to adopt and practice beliefs, beyond the certainty justification. Another reason to adopt and practice a belief is because you believe, on balance, that if such a belief turned out to be true, it would be widely beneficial, or at least that it could produce the least harmful outcomes or be best positioned to counteract some pervasive harm you don't want. That consequence could provide a powerful incentive to practice a belief even though the beliefs do not yet meet the criteria of the certainty justification. Let this be the "consequences justification".

Formulating our own beliefs is both necessary and fraught. You have beliefs, whether you formulated them deliberately or not. It's actually the ones you haven't consciously formulated that you should worry about the most. The idea of choosing beliefs is that you will adopt beliefs and practice them without perfect knowledge of how true they are, or knowledge of all the ramifications they might have. Rather than being frozen into ignorance and non-belief by this gambit, hopefully you will simply add sufficient humility to your character so that you're able to make adjustments to your beliefs as the need arises.

The weak certainty justification and the consequences justification are both candidates for reasons to have beliefs, and in some cases if the two types of justification are in conflict, there may be sufficient reason to prefer the consequences justification over the weak certainty justification. Here are two arguments in favor of preferring the consequence justification.

1. As seemingly attractive as the weak certainty justification is, its lack of conscious formulation is prone to creating "blind spots" that we fail to acknowledge, and it can still be wrong. The combination of those two things means the weak certainty justification can easily become entrenched, and that we might not register its faults until it has gone catastrophically wrong.
   
   
2. Overuse of the weak certainty justification can make us dependent on it, and can lead us to dismiss our duty to have beneficial beliefs even if they don't fit into a certainty justification. Indeed, there are many important beliefs that we may need to have about things that rarely occur, are hard to understand, or where traditional certainty is weak.

If we played this out by considering all types of justifications for beliefs, and we considered many examples of how each type performs, it may be that we emerge with the conclusion that the consequences justification is actually among the strongest reason for adopting and practicing a belief. The primary risk of using the consequences justification is either that your formulation of the consequences has some type of inaccuracy or corruption within it, or that your formulation of consequences was missing a key component which, once played out, leads your beliefs and behaviors off into a different direction than the consequence you began with.

What do you find agreeable, disagreeable, or left out of the gist that I am driving at here? Let me know in the comments.