Your Doxastic Life: Nails or Screws?
How would you characterize your doxastic life? Does it contain nails or screws? (I’m referring to all kinds of belief, not just the religious sort.)
Fast and efficient, nails are easy to drive in and quick to remove. They enter the plank of one’s mind suddenly and with a forceful Bang! Yet they are more likely to be temporary inserts. Their arrival and departure are accomplished wholly by external muscle. The pressures of the world dislodge them over time. Their presence indicates a transitory quality.
Slow and steady, screws are hard to put in place and difficult to extract. They take cylindrical residence gradually but with roots more permanent. The mind is more involved in their establishment than is the case with nails; its rational capacity works with their threads to secure a firm footing. They are less vulnerable to external sway, being held in place by the tapped holes of reason. If you are covering your windows with panels to prepare for a hurricane, you use screws, not nails.
Nails are fast. Screws are fastened.
“One class of men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Pulpit and the Pew