That type of belief is definitely based on opinion and acceptance. Like I believe in God based on what i myself have seen, and i accept him. The atheists don't think their is a god and don't accept him. that's their flaw.
What is BELIEF ?
by EdenOne 233 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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nicolaou
atheists don't think their is a god and don't accept him.
How. Many. Times.
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Village Idiot
pressman, "The atheists don't think their is a god and don't accept him. that's their flaw."
Theists think there is a god and that's a flaw.
A harmless flaw if they happen to be Deists who don't believe in the demon sky god of the Bible and the usual egocentric beliefs that many Theists have as it relates to their religion.
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Half banana
Belief is a necessary mental component of being human. It directs our personal responses to situations and directs our actions.
There are useful beliefs and there are harmful beliefs. The key to useful belief is that it is based on evidence.
Many people hold on to ideas they proudly claim are their religious beliefs. They invest their emotional attachment to these beliefs for existential comfort even though they are based on unprovable fictions such as claiming that the source of the beliefs are invisible spirits.
“Jesus loves me” is an unprovable belief, it is also an un-disprovable one and therefore one which cannot logically be built upon, philosophically it is therefore irrelevant.
Gravity, although invisible, has measurable properties which extend beyond the Earth, this is both provable and potentially disprovable which makes the belief a useful proposition from which further constructs can be made.
If something is believed to be beyond the five senses...why waste time on it? If you give your life to something which is not recognised by the five senses or cannot be measured; then you have wasted your life.
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OUTLAW
An agnostic is just an atheist who has some more thinking to do.....cofty
It's ridiculous how often atheists are told what they believe/don't believe and why, and what label they ought to apply to themselves.....cofty
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By the same token, it's ridiculous how agnostics are told what they believe and don't believe and why and that they haven't made all their thinking, otherwise they would be atheists......Eden
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EdenOne
Back to topic:
"Infants and animals, however, are free of the emotional biases that color the reasoning of adults because they haven't yet developed (or won't, in the case of animals) the meta-cognitive abilities of adults, i.e., the ability to look back on their conclusions and form opinions about them. Infants and animals are therefore forced into drawing conclusions I consider compulsory beliefs—"compulsory" because such beliefs are based on principles of reason and evidence that neither infants nor animals are actually free to disbelieve.
This leads to the rather ironic conclusion that infants and animals are actually better at reasoning from evidence than adults. Not that adults are, by any means, able to avoid forming compulsory beliefs when incontrovertible evidence presents itself (e.g., if a rock is dropped, it will fall), but adults are so mired in their own meta-cognitions that few facts absorbed by their minds can escape being attached to a legion of biases, often creating what I consider rationalized beliefs—"rationalized" because adult judgments about whether an idea is true are so often powerfully influenced by what he or she wants to be true. This is why, for example, creationists continue to disbelieve in evolution despite overwhelming evidence in support of it and activist actors and actresses with autistic children continue to believe that immunizations cause autism despite overwhelming evidence against it.
But if we look down upon people who seem blind to evidence that we ourselves find compelling, imagining ourselves to be paragons of reason and immune to believing erroneous conclusions as a result of the influence of our own pre-existing beliefs, more likely than not we're only deceiving ourselves about the strength of our objectivity. "
- Alex Likerman, M.D. in Psychology Today
While the author points, with justice, to creationists and their disbelief in evolution, I also contend that atheism can become likewise a form of rationalized belief, subject to become def and blind to contrary arguments, not based of their merits, but simply because they go against their deeply engrained biases.
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Oubliette
“Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.” ― W.C. Fields -
Jonathan Drake
Eden I highly suggest reading this, I just ordered it myself:
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Faith-Religion-Terror/dp/0393327655
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EdenOne
Funny, because that's on my "to read" list, Jonathan Drake. Although it focuses more on organized religions and their part in politic lobbying than in pure theoretical theism/atheism analysis. But I'll read it with interest when I can.
Eden
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Jonathan Drake
From what I've read about it part of Sam Harris point in the book is the danger of faith in general. So it would cover your recent posts in theory.
ill receive it Tuesday probably. U should get it, we could compare our thoughts.
