To reconstruct 2nd century cultural literature context of Roman satire in Early Christian texts, it is useful to think about what naturalistic assumptions are and the dimensions of error in causal relationships.
The idea is to reconstruct historical context using methodological naturalism, where we are not trying to impose or project a modern meaning of some text, but instead trying to see natural causes and form a bigger picture that usually involves great complexity.
- Introduction to naturalism
- Selection bias in Early Christian texts
- Self-centrism and fake psychological narratives
- Homer vs Reality: A case study
- Viewing Early Christian texts through a naturalistic lens
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.
Despite countless claims of supernatural events, there have been none scientifically confirmed supernatural events over the entire course of known history. There are some research areas that still have unexplained events, for example in the neuroscience of consciousness, where there is a lack of theories to bridge the language gaps between scientific terminology and self-reported conscious experiences. However, there is no reason to believe that naturalism weakens the ability of scientists to reason about these events.
This can be explained by how we use logic in theorem proving, as an example:
If I believe A about the world and B is true, then I can reason more reliably about the world by assuming A & B, as long as B does not lead to contradictions with A, in which case I need to modify A to be consistent with B.
The evidence that supports naturalism as position is overwhelming, where in every case any scientific experiment has been performed in which some supernatural event could happen, it did not happen and instead confirmed naturalism as the surviving theory.
For example, in physics, the equations that describe motion uses mathematics as its language, in the same way game engine programmers use mathematics to create physics engines for games. Just like a player can be constrained to gameplay that follows the rules of physics in a video game, there has been none observed exceptions to the reverse engineered mathematical code that underlies physics in reality.
With other words, humans have inferred mathematical descriptions that describe the world very accurately. Sometimes, it is very difficult due to lack of data and computational capacity, yet it is used successfully to predict the weather and climate in complex scientific models. Anyone that claims otherwise, are either ignorant or lying, or a combination of both. You should not excuse this behavior despite that this is common behavior to many people. People can be narcissistic and have inferiority complexes against the sound methodology of science, but this does not imply that the science is worse than what many people believe.
Historically, when a person believes something that contradicts naturalism, the correct action has been to change the beliefs that contradict naturalism, instead of trying to correct naturalism.
When studying language bias, e.g. Seshatism vs Platonism as bases for Joker Calculus, there are some language biases where one can talk about propositions such as a deity that is infinitely powerful and exists outside any physical dimension regardless how many higher dimensions one can examine. Theoretically, a such proposition is perfectly fine and just one of many strange ideas that can be expressed. However, this does not imply that it is reasonable to believe in a such being.
Culturally, the proposition of an infinitely powerful being outside normal physical dimensions has evolved through history. There is no doubt that many people believed in a such proposition and tried to navigate their complex social world with this in mind. Yet, one can show that how people reasoned about this has changed over time. Before Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers, people where much more biased toward Seshatism than they are toward Platonism today. What people thought of as caused by deities in the ancient world, overlaps with our understanding of naturalism, but people often attributed an extra spiritual dimension to events and desired to fulfill social expectations satisfying normative beliefs. They did not have the language of mathematics to describe nature in a very precise way. So, to navigate these complex imagined spiritual dimensions, they used story telling, music and hallucinations by drugs or gases. When people later discovered more mathematics and learned to describe nature, they developed a distate for earlier spiritual traditions and turned away from these methods in trying to explain the cosmos. The problem today is not people keeping to these traditions, but creating modern myths about history trying to explain away what normative social behavior today regard as wacko and crazy behavior. This is where the modern myth of the historical Jesus comes from, which was never originally a part of Early Christianity.
In Early Christianity, people are attributing spiritual dimensions to the observable strange orbit of Venus and believe that this is physical evidence of their own particular spiritual tradition. The intellectuals at the time work on epicycles to describe this orbit and believe what they are doing is the most important work performed through the entire history of mankind, kind of like how AGI researchers today tend to believe they are working on the most important problem of all time. This bias is common human behavior and is due to people not knowing what they do not know. When we look back at the 2nd century which was when Early Christianity evolved, we can laugh at how stupid it seems to attribute spiritual meaning to epicycles. Yet, in the future, people will probably laugh at the over-optimistic AGI researchers today that create hype to attract investors.
There is no doubt that using epicycles was an important mathematical breakthrough, but it was just a stepping stone toward developing a more complex picture of mathematics as a whole. Similarly, there happens many breakthroughs in AGI research, but this does not remove the fact that to achieve these breakthroughs researchers have to collaborate in large numbers and much of the success is mostly from scaling up infrastructure of computation. As people get more experience with AGI in general, they invent better methods that perform better than earlier methods.
More than anything, naturalism is an expectation that reality can be described in sufficient detail for many purposes by dumbing it down and using mathematics as language to describe it, while any spiritual dimensions and high expectations from single improvements are absent. In times when people see progress, which is highly filtered through masking most failures, as evidence of the "end of time", they tend to form personality cults, usually worshiping a person that captilizes on their superstition. This makes the period of Early Christianity culturally relevant for our times, because it shares many similar characteristics. Using naturalism as assumption, one can reflect and reason better about this past, both to learn history and to learn more about how the world works today.
Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby failing to ensure that the sample obtained is representative of the population intended to be analyzed.
Simply put, selection bias is when people are at the end of some process of data, while thinking they are closer to the beginning of it.
For example, when people read translated texts from the period of Early Christianity, they get often influenced by the choice of translation that the translator does. People might get the impression that they are witnessing history, e.g. in the gospels about Jesus, but in reality, they are being told a story presented as historical events by the translator to cover up the Homeric style of writing, that otherwise would give the reader the impression of reading a poem, a work of poetry filled with parables.
Furthermore, the texts that people usually read are chosen by other people who lived in the ancient world, that does not represent the full body of texts that were available to them at the time, but selected due to political motivations of keeping people under control.
If you want a closer experience to actual Early Christianity, then you should list all known texts from this period and chose texts by random and read them just as carefully that people today read the New Testament.
It should be no surprise from what we know about Early Christian texts, that when this method is applied, a picture of an incoherent theology and lots of weird religious ideas come forward. This was how people were thinking at the time. They did not put together texts to form a coherent picture that gave people impression of something historical. People shared the same characters, e.g. Jesus, Simon Magus and Mary across stories. However, the characters behave very differently depending on which author that writes the stories, which points to no specific underlying historical characters that can be analyzed properly.
The only reason that scholars today attribute certain characteristic behavior to the historical Jesus, is because they date some texts earlier than others and hence weight them by evidence. Yet, this is based on the idea that these stories were written with the intention to describe historical events. Even in texts by Josephus, a historian from the 1st century, his eye witness accounts are today considered unreliable scientific evidence. How much more unreliable is a text that is written in style of the poems by the poet Homer?
If there was any reliable oral tradition recording historical events that could be traced back to the 1st century in Early Christianity, it seemingly vanishes in the 2nd century across multiple nations, thousands of people and at least 3 different written languages. There is not a single known record of the name of any poor and ordinary Christian from the entire 2nd century, despite having thousands of texts from this period that debates highly intricate theological points and the nature of the divine.
This overwhelming evidence points to these people simply not being concerned about historical events, but about retelling extra-ordinary claims about the supernatural, which evolved into an institution building multiple monastaries and churches with Jesus supposed foreskin on display, as a "proof of Jesus' historicity". Scientifically, you can not be less serious by treating this source as reliable.
Biblical scholarship, while being mostly secular study and performed honestly by many people who are not biased toward Christianity as a belief system, is the least scientifically credible discipline known among all disciplines. For example, just recently researchers have started doing data science and there are merely a handful of them, while in most other disciplines, almost every researcher is also doing data science.
People in biblical scholarship are still writing books to get at the top best seller list, claiming that they have the evidence of a historical Jesus, based on a couple references of supposedly translations from Aramaic into Greek, kind of like how South Koreans today make up seemingly strange titles and catchphrases in English for their TV shows, plus a reference by Clemens of Rome of writing about Paul in the past, spurious references in chapters later than 14 that might have been added to Paul's letter to the Romans, without having any actual texts from any person who knew Paul or any of Jesus' disciples. When Celsus writes about Early Christians, the sects he mentions would be seen as very weird versions of Christianity today. The Simonians did not even worship Jesus as savior figure, but a different character: Simon Magus.
With other words, the entire scientific discipline of biblical scholarship can not hold a candle to any other scientific discipline. The evidence about a historical Jesus is literally paper thin, plus that his behavior is portrayed differently in various texts, so even if you could claim Jesus existed historically, there is not much to say about him as a person. This problem is further magnified by that most of the sources were handed down in generations by religious movements that frequently censored, burned books and forged texts. There are very few traces of texts going back to the 2nd century from these religious movements, as they were apparently invisible to history compared to other competing sects, but when going back to the 1st century it is all gone: Every sect of Early Christianity is seemingly seen nowhere.
This is the process that is between you as a reader and the beginning of it.
It is difficult to come up with any example of any process that is more vulnerable to selection bias than this one. Not even in fiction, people have the creativity to come up with something absurd as claiming historicity and even supernatural events at the start of this complex and higly biased selection process. To a scientist using naturalistic assumptions, this should be both regarded as a form of superstition, but also it is a process that is over time uncovered due to getting better information over time. Every year in the past, this was even worse. While biblical scholarship scrapes the bottom of scientific credibility today, think about how worse it was: It was a thousand times worse than today for many centuries.
I hope you can laugh at this absurd situation, because from here on I will show you this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition to the data being bad by being highly influenced by selection bias, what adds to the problem, from being a pile of nonsense to a huge mountain of hubris, is something what naturalism points to regarding all human behavior.
To explain this topic, let us start gently. You might have noticed that people like talking about themselves. When people come in situations where they have to deal with problems that are not about themselves, they quickly lose interest and get easily distracted. Every school teacher knows this problem among kids, but it is not just kids that display this behavior.
The human brain is highly impacted by story telling. For example, you can take a look at this study of fMRI scans by people presented stories. When working from the assumptions of naturalism, it is important to not just think about how humans behave in the world in the way we report and reflect on our own experiences. In principle, the human brain is just a physical object, which receives some stimuli and gives a response.
This is a common behavior to many systems and like other systems of this kind, people develop methods and tools to control them. For example, when biking, the act of balancing a bike requires applying forces through the body and in return getting desired outcomes, e.g. to get from A to B. The human brain is a very complex machine and in comparison, a bike is much simpler. Yet, they both have in common that you can apply stimuli and get responses. A bike requires different kind of stimuli than a human brain, but the ideas and methods translate across one scientific discipline to another, because there are many systems with similar basic characteristics.
Using a bike as an example, when it rolls down a hill without anyone controlling it, the bike tends to move forward under some initial configurations, which can make it seem for a few seconds as if some invisible person were sitting on top of it. However, this illusion falls apart when the bike tips over.
Similarly, when studying human behavior from naturalistic assumptions, it is important to not just assume that you know how people work, until you can describe it more accurately using mathematics. In some ways, due to humans being social animals, need stimuli from others to not "tip over", kind of like the bike without a rider.
What seems like normal human behavior is actually part of how humans behave as a collective, with complex information networks to regulate and control individuals in a social organization. When these information networks break down, the individuals no longer behave what most people regard as normal and sometimes they even die in large numbers in the mud or frozen fields and their bodies get eaten by animals or buried in mass graves. This is because they all synchronize their information networks to follow a single leader.
For a few years, just like with the bike, it might seem as if people are continuing living normally, but this illusion breaks down, just like with the bike, when people tip out of balance and get themselves killed. It is because they do not get the stimuli required from the people around them to function properly. The human brain did not evolve to manage on its own, it seeks to specialize and narrow down local phenomena of relevance to individual control and autonomy. This ability to focus on the self, as set apart from the rest of the world, is highly inter-connected with the social information networks that organize collective behavior. These are two halves that work together, in evolution, not by any supernatural events.
With other words: The human brain is responding to stimuli both as an individual and a social being, yet from the need to focus on the self consciously, the social part is mostly filtered out. This means, it is natural for a human being to be self-centered in expression, yet unconsciously, it relates to the world in its complexity.
Therefore, in stories that people write in the ancient world, we find that they both have a bias toward self-centrism, but also seeking a cosmic explanation, often trying to achieve both these ends in the same moves and at the same time. This is because this phenomena reflects how ordinary people behave naturally.
Think about how texts in Early Christianity functions: In one way, they are expressions made by the author, but also at the same time these expressions are seeking to influence others.
When writing code for a computer, a programmer often needs to give very specific instructions and need tools to check that there is not a missing part of the program to make it work. Programs called "compilers" are translating the language the programmer uses into instructions that the CPU or GPU can understand directly.
Similarly, when people write texts to other people, they use a language that the recipients can understand. Otherwise, the text would just be an expression of the thoughts of the author. Natural language are made up of instructions that a human brain can understand and interface with. In principle, it has no special thing about that makes it different from computer code, except that the language is more flexible due to the human brain being more intelligent.
You can imagine a form of life which is even more flexible in language than humans are today. These life forms, perhaps using some kind of weird form of mathematics, could have thoughts that are so advanced compared to our thoughts, that we might compare them to how human thoughts are to snail's thoughts.
Such instructions in this language might look very different from both computer code and natural language.
In Early Christianity, there are many people who learn to read and write, as the first people of their families. This means, they have no culture of reading and writing going back in history. To these people, reading and writing is incredibly wonderful and new, kind of like when people got personal computers for the first time in the 80s.
This is why it is very difficult to understand the historical context of Early Christianity, because we struggle putting ourselves in their shoes of how revolutionary this was to them. Like with technology that evolved rapidly recently, people in Early Christianity experiment with language as their way of making progress. This means they might do things differently than what people today expect from most texts they read.
For example, people might put two texts of two different genres together and pretend this is a single coherent genre. Or, they might take a story from a different religious belief system and tweak it to make it look like their own cultural background, without that story having the cultural tradition that it might give impression of at later point in time. Since reading and writing is so new and exciting for these people, minor inconsistencies in theology and belief systems might be overlooked in favor of celebrating the ability to present such texts.
This means, when people read such texts and there are thousands of them circulating at the time, just by statistical coincidence, an accidental way of putting a text together might influence a group of people who start their own sect and these individuals in this group construct self-narratives based on this influence. Due to how human beings function as individuals and social groups, they can this way construct a false psychological narrative.
False psychological narratives are far from unfamiliar to most people. Hence, it is not worth the time to go into depth about them here. However, the important part is to break down the process using naturalistic assumptions, to actually explain how these false psychological narratives come about. After doing this, one might notice that there is no need for any additional explanations. It all makes sense within a naturalistic framework and can be applied for various purposes.
On the other hand, if I tried to explain how false psychological narratives come about using demons and angels and spiritual revelation and appealing to claims about historical supernatural events, then this would just be like sending instructions to other people about how to behave. It would have no scientific value as an explanation, despite that many people use this form today as justification in their own explanations, both in relative to their own life and the cosmos. This is how the majority of Early Christians express themselves, in multiple ways and full of contradictions.
When you are looking for a single coherent story of Early Christianity, then you view history through a distorted lens influenced by modern myths. The actual history of Early Christianity is not traveling a single path with a single destination. It is multi-tracked and crossing all over the place with seemingly no clear goal in mind. This is just how people behave and what we should find according to naturalistic expectations. The story of Early Christianity as a single thread serving a single purpose is just a fairy tale, that can be thrown in the garbage can of bad ideas in history.
This is why even with the bad data that is from this period of history, people are even more biased, just by simply being human beings that construct self-narratives and relate these stories to other people around them living in today's society. While one might consider biblical scholarship, which is the highest academic achievement among all uses of Early Christian texts, yet can not hold a candle to any other scientific discipline due to having extremely selection bias and bad data, still is dwarfed by the fact that people in this field go looking for "the explanation" as the final answer that solves it all.
It is kind of like a person messing around with tea leaves in a cup to try predict the future. The problem is not just that the data is bad, but also the approach the person is trying in the first place. With that approach, even if the tea cup showed a reflection of the future like from a TV screen, that person would still be incapable of predicting the future to any significant degree, because the problem is not just what the person sees, but how that person construct self-narratives around what is seen.
You need naturalistic assumptions to turn even direct clips shown of the future into meaningful data in the current moment, to make it is useful.
Philosophically, I believe naturalism is a flawed position because it both sets the rules and competes at the same time. It is kind of an Olympic game where the arrangement is made by some of the athletes participating in the game. This is reason to be critical or skeptical about naturalism, but it is far from such a flaw that is can be compared to how bad most people even perceive biblical scholarship, what they think is wrong with it, which is a thousand times better than what most people do in their reasoning, yet at the moment lagging behind and lacking sorely what other scientific disciplines have achieved.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Homer is the most influential poet in the ancient world. Just an example: Homer inspired Alexander the Great and in turn, Alexander the Great inspired many other people.
Sometimes, history produces examples that might seem almost supernatural, because these events seems to out of the ordinary and displaced from common sense. Yet, everything Alexander the Great did in actual history was most probably, extremely likely, to be safe within the framework of what can be explained by natural laws and using naturalism as assumption.
However, when going back to Homer, it would be profoundly stupid to regard it as a work relaying historical details accurately.
Homer does not have much to bring to the table compared to reality itself. There is a fundamental difference between poetry and actual history, that can not be bridged by simply being a genius poet.
Alexander the Great might have believed Homer to an unusual degree, but he also suffered psychological problems from his complex social relations with his family. Homer was merely Alexander's excuse to unleash his egomaniac high risk gambles, that just turned to be coinciding with a weak-minded Persian emperor with issues of political insecurity.
When looking at Homer, sure, there might be a nugget of historical truth that can be summarized as the following: There was place called Troy.
However, when attempting to use Homer to explain the psychology of Alexander the Great, one has to be much more careful, because there are other naturalistic explanations than just a single text. While being highly influential text, the actual causal relationship through history are always more complex than what is communicated through language.
The point is: You can not just take reality and put it side by side with poetry to justify this as a valid comparison. Reality is much greater and complex than books people write. Naturalism is a philosophical position about reality, not about literature. Your concerns about literature are very small and insignificant compared to making naturalistic assumptions.
When people do these kind of mistakes, they ignore entire dimensions of errors that they might make. For example, in reality, some people abuse children. If you construct a narrative of history as if child abuse never happens, then that narrative is not a good representation of what causal relationships there might be. The entire model is wrong, not because it lacks a path from A to B, Early Christianity to present time, but because it fails to account for all the errors that would likely happen along the way and influence the result.
With other words, you can not just think about history as simple instructions of something causing another thing and all these things are sensible to our particular modern lens and society. It is not a computer program that is proving some theorem with a set of minimal steps one takes to achieve this end. History is messy and you can only hope to catch a glimpse of how it was like, just to experience it anywhere close to somebody who might have lived at the time. You can just give up trying to figure out all the things that might have happened in reality.
Humans like stories. Yet, stories are over-simplified narratives interpreted through a subjective lens along a single path that excludes most the detail and context. It does not mean that people living through this experience have access to supernatural knowledge. On the contrary, people were having superstitions based on all sorts of accidental complexity and common knowledge they shared at the time. From naturalistic assumptions, you expect that they get even less than lack of truth. People simply made up stuff, based on how their brains function in respons to stimuli, but also due to greed and political motives.
What happens over and over is that people take data from history, run it through their own intelligence and outputs a new story, which is part myth and part containing nuggets of historical value. In turn, people read these stories and form their own imaginative landscape. From this imaginative landscape, people might think they have access to actual reality, but they are merely at the end of a long and complex process full of errors. Often, people can not even imagine what kind of surprises they get when doing closer investigations.
For example, from the traditional view of Hebrew biblical scholarship, one would expect to find a separate culture in Judea than Hellenistic culture. However, archeology found coins depicting the high priest on one side and Zeus on the other. This was centuries before Jesus.
Btw, are you sure that Jesus worshiped Yahweh?
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Oh, right. I forgot that you could not even imagine that kind of dimension of error.
I hope you get my point. Let us treat Early Christian texts as what it really is: Poetry.
This page is not just trying to show you how naturalistic assumptions can break down some of the errors that people make. It is also an introduction for how to start viewing Early Christian texts through a naturalistic lens. With other words, go beyond just merely repeated failure, but also to make progress and create something that is not just an overall error.
First, think about a text as any other text written in history. Start at the root of classification and work your way progressively into the branch where the text belongs. It is kind of like, instead of starting regarding a human as person like we all do on everyday basis, going back to the earliest recorded life form and trace the history of the person forward until the present. To know how a text is written, you first need to study the history of writing. You need to see a text in a historical lens where it is put in context with the entire history of mankind since we put marks in clay.
Try to put numbers on it. Do you know how many texts are estimated of what was written across the branches? How many texts survived until today? If you lack data, then try some math. Learn interval arithmetic so you can make estimates yourself knowing your calculations are sound.
You have to learn these skills, because otherwise, you are not actually doing any sciencing. The goal is not to get your results published, but to practice your craft. Stop being a useless person. Grow up.
The hard work you put into getting actual data, instead of just constructing narratives in your head, is going to pay off over time. This is how you participate in the Englightenment. You are no longer an ape that just plays around in the mud. Rise up and reach for the potential that you have in you.
When you have the numbers, you need to visualize them. This is hard. It is not something that everybody are good at. You need tools. You need to learn from other people. Appreciate the work that scientists put into presenting their findings. They spent hours trying to improve it. Sometimes, they did the best they could. Do not expect a Hollywood movie. Science is a lot of groundwork.
It is tempting to write lots of books and long articles about something that interests you. The problem is that most people do not have time to read that much. Try instead to think about how you can turn it into a tool. How can you design the result such that it becomes more useful for other people? Maybe can you publish data in JSON format, to save people from manually creating these datasets themselves? Also, you will be surprised by how much flexibility there is in a general programming language, e.g. like Rust. Have you thought about publishing your findings as a Rust library on crates.io?
One of the struggles in biblical scholarship today, is that therer are several brilliant lexicons which people spend milleniums in work-hours producing them, but at the same time, applying this knowledge to texts in a methodic and integrated way is very difficult. Not everyone has the time to study e.g. Ancient Greek and learn it as a language, but also, relying on a translation alone introduces additional classes of errors.
Usually, the way people use Early Christian texts, is to read them once or twice and write some thoughts about it. However, today we have computers that can read texts much faster than humans can. We have AI tech that to some extent that can understand the context of the text. Yet, AI trained on human data also contain biases that people have, or even biases particular to some AI system. If you can not make an AI read a text unbiased, then you can not make a human read the same text unbiased. The problem is that there has to be some kind of additional knowledge that is used in an argument that takes the text as input and produces a conclusion. Think about it as a program that produces outputs depending on the inputs. If you modify the text, then you should be able to reach other conclusions. Any result you produce only has value if the conclusion could be different in another possible world. You need to test these other possible worlds to check that you actually get other conclusions.
It is very tempting to dive into the spiritual dimension that people writing Early Christian texts are preoccupied by. However, you can only produce value if this can be useful to somebody. To understand how a spiritual dimension works in language, you have to study language biases. The way this works is that how people think along these lines is according to rules, kind of like when people tell one-liner jokes, that meets some expectations, although the reader can not easily predict what is coming next. These rules, that might be informal, contain the information that makes your result potentially useful. The information is not in the spiritual semantics, but kind of orthogonal to it.
For example, when a person uses "Zoe", this can be put in a context of a possible world where the same person wrote "Sophia", which was worshiped very similarly in Early Christianity. Yet, the person chose to use "Zoe" instead "Sophia", so there might be a meaning behind this choice. If it is only possible to have "Zoe" in this location, then there is no information there. There would be no scientific value.
Many people who are indoctrinated into Christianity as children, are taught that these texts are perfect in some sense that easily gives the impression they could not have been differently written. By definition, this belief implies that there can not be any science about these texts.
It takes time to reach a new level of knowledge where one sees the text through a lens in which they could have been different. The point is not to advocate a particular interpretation of the texts to serve a political goal, but to provide a background for understanding the text. Most of the time, people are running on some kind of auto-pilot that makes them immediately try using texts, instead of seeing them through new perspectives. It takes much longer time and hard work to bring about these other perspectives, but this is how actual science is done, as opposed to just using the shortest way of instinctive human behavior.
For example, when using Joker Calculus, the two fundamental language biases, Seshatism vs Platonism, are so deep and philosophical rich on their own, that thinking about this for hours can be mentally exhausting. This is why it is important to take breaks and do something else. Come back when you had time to rest the brain, because it is probably not built for doing this work naturally. Sometimes, you have to consider give up on some project, because, this is just how science works. In reality, not everything is achieveble. Try to make a plan in advance such that you can stop the research underway and still get something out of it.
Remember: This is not a competition. You do not have to go on forever with something you no longer want to do. You can stop and do something else and that might also be valuable later on. Perhaps you can return at some later point in time when you are more experienced. There is no need to stay loyal to one particular study in science, because science is not like a cult, where you might get excommunicated when leaving and entering another.
A common fallacy that people use, often in childish discussions about biblical scholarship, is that people need to read everything and understand it all before they have the ability to make contributions. You do not owe anyone trying to understand all details of their position, nor do you have defend some position against others in discussion. If you have fun doing science, then you can mean all kinds of things that other people disagree with.
Opinions are not that important in science, but this is what people easily latch onto. Expect that people are wrong about a lot of things, even if they are experts in the field. When you write something in a paper, try think about the paper as having that opinion, not yourself. You can have conflicting opinions and describe them in different papers.
For example, Carl A. P. Ruck is a brilliant scholar, not because he has a lot of controversial opinions and some turned out to be correct, but because he did actual science. As long as he did the science, his opinions did not matter and for the same reason his research is valuable today, was precisely because Ruck could be wrong and still his research would be valuable and he would be a brilliant scholar.
Yet, people always have biases and we use them to guide our research. This is natural and should not be pointed out as a flaw, although many have a bad habit of doing so.
From naturalistic assumptions, you can have even greater freedom in expression of thought, even contradictory beliefs. There is no requirement of having a coherent belief system. If you do not enjoy doing science in a particular field, then you are free to stop and perhaps try something else. Do not try to optimize too hard for a single goal, but instead look for things that are interesting. However, most importantly: You can not produce valuable research without also potentially being wrong. Follow the evidence where it leads, even this might be uncomfortable for other people. Some people react strongly to mere possibilities, that are different from what they are used to think. Perhaps they demand that you at least is correct about those assumptions, but you should stick to your right of being wrong about these things too. A mere possibility of being wrong is not the same as being actual wrong in reality. However, if we do not explore the landscape around actual reality and never venture into possible worlds, then we can not produce valuable research.