Gating Off Voices, Part 2

After posting Gating Off Voices; Especially Ones That Speak of ECT, I realized that there were some more things to say on the subject.

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One thing I could have cleared up, had I noticed it, relates to this passage:

If God doesn't exist, then hardening doesn't matter, so if hardening matters, it matters how we relate to God, and sometimes it is best to deliberately shut out some of the pathological voices in order to hear his better.

I think this is correct, if we take "hardening" in a narrow sense (only as that which is caused when we shut out the voice of God). But in a broader sense, deliberately shutting out a voice can be dangerous, whether God exists, or not. Could it be that by committing to God, or to a particular understanding of God, we are setting ourselves up for a bad outcome, perhaps the worst outcome possible? We might die young and in pain (the worst outcome according to materialism?) or we might go to a hell of annihilation or ECT (the worst outcome according to Christianity and Islam, assuming one of them is true and we are committed to the other). It might seem like the best position is to not commit to anything, but that is a kind of commitment in itself. It matters what we choose, so we should apply critical thinking, which can make various paths appear doubtworthy, and despite that tendency of critical thinking to produce doubt, we may choose a path. Even remaining in a state of "they're all doubtworthy so I won't choose" is doubtworthy.

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In the previous Gating Off Voices post, I laid out two approaches to bad voices: shut them down, or add other voices so that you have a better connection with the overall truth. Can these two be related?

Here's one account of belief: All we have access to are possibilities. That's what we see. But sometimes, as we add possibilities to our stock of things that we can imagine, simply to imagine a possibility causes other possibilities to seem untrue. It's like how God can't truly understand love and still choose to prefer evil.

So then, to know any truth, including by adding truths, could potentially shut out bad voices. I think that adding truths as a tactic is more trusting, because with it, as you stop trusting truths, you tend to trust more truths at the same time. In fact, it is only by trusting more truths that you can shut out any, on this model.