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I ask this because I just can't make that choice. I was basically a skeptic from the time I was very young. If it's not tangible, I won't believe in it.
Yet, if you talk to devout Christians, they try to convert people like it is a choice. Granted, these are also people who think you can choose to stop being gay, so whatever...
for some yes and others no. For example, fundiez, list the personality traits and it quickly become obvious that they had no choice. they are either all in, or all out, they can be no other way. In some wayz I wish I was like them, that bubble seems so easy.
Yeah that's really a mindset imho and at the crux of the religious proposition. If you allow your mind to wander off into self-delusion and confirmation bias....you'll likely be perfectly fine accepting all sorts of rationalizations for things that really aren't demonstrable.
Even putting aside religion....how about relationships? People believe all sorts of things....both good and bad as well as true and untrue....about their SO. They sometimes think they can change the other person, or can't face the pain of betrayal, or simply acknowledge they made a bad choice for themselves; while in other cases they are so braced for hurt that they presume wrongdoing from their SO. We are quite gullible creatures of our imaginations.
So it isn't overly surprising (though certainly dissappointing) that many of us "choose" to believe in things we have no demonstrable evidence for. But I see these choices as being subconscious choices....driven by the need to (however pointlessly) protect ourselves from (real or imagined) harms.
So for the person that is willing to own their thoughts, feelings, and emotions....no matter what they are...it is not a choice to believe. You are simply unconvinced. For the person that is less willing (for the variety of reasons there are) to sacrifice truth for comfort.....belief certainly seems to be a choice.
I couldn't say, I had the reverse experience. Belief was imposed upon me as a child and I accepted it the same way a child accepts all the norms in his or her environment. There was no choice being made because I wasn't aware that there was an alternative.
Disbelief was a choice. Once I reached the age of reason and began considering the validity of the doctrines I had been fed, I decided that they were without merit and ceased believing in them.
As for those born into a religious environment who sustained their faith through their adult years, that seems more a matter of simply never questioning a childhood norm than making an affirmative choice to believe. Then again I'm not inside those heads. From my perspective, something went wrong with those folks, they should have reasoned their way out of belief just as I did, but for whatever reasons, they did not. From their perspective, something went wrong with me and I deviated from subscription to a valued norm.
The other case would be someone who was raised in an environment without belief in a god. If such a person reached maturity and embraced a deity, that certainly radiates the appearance of someone having made a choice to believe.
So for the person that is willing to own their thoughts, feelings, and emotions....no matter what they are...it is not a choice to believe. You are simply unconvinced. For the person that is less willing (for the variety of reasons there are) to sacrifice truth for comfort.....belief certainly seems to be a choice.
I would suggest that the latter sort of person doesn't truly "decide to believe". They "decide to accept" unsubstantiated assertions. It is submission to an authoritarian assertion under threat of eternal damnation or perhaps (in more liberal groups) just the threat of group rejection or lack of full fledged belonging.
No one truly "decides to believe". They are convinced, or not. A person telling themselves that the Bible or their authority figures are right and will reward them for agreeing is not the same thing, qualitatively, as being convinced based on evidence. However, they are similar enough that believers and unbelievers regularly talk past each other, using significantly different meanings for the same terms (such as "believe" or "faith").
Yeah that's really a mindset imho and at the crux of the religious proposition. If you allow your mind to wander off into self-delusion and confirmation bias....you'll likely be perfectly fine accepting all sorts of rationalizations for things that really aren't demonstrable.
Even putting aside religion....how about relationships? People believe all sorts of things....both good and bad as well as true and untrue....about their SO. They sometimes think they can change the other person, or can't face the pain of betrayal, or simply acknowledge they made a bad choice for themselves; while in other cases they are so braced for hurt that they presume wrongdoing from their SO. We are quite gullible creatures of our imaginations.
So it isn't overly surprising (though certainly dissappointing) that many of us "choose" to believe in things we have no demonstrable evidence for. But I see these choices as being subconscious choices....driven by the need to (however pointlessly) protect ourselves from (real or imagined) harms.
So for the person that is willing to own their thoughts, feelings, and emotions....no matter what they are...it is not a choice to believe. You are simply unconvinced. For the person that is less willing (for the variety of reasons there are) to sacrifice truth for comfort.....belief certainly seems to be a choice.
Disbelief was a choice. Once I reached the age of reason and began considering the validity of the doctrines I had been fed, I decided that they were without merit and ceased believing in them.
But once you had the reasoning powers and perspective and data in place, did you really have any choice but to not believe that which was without merit? The key difference for a believer is the acceptance of asserted merit and the refusal to actually evaluate it for yourself. But once you actually form an understanding of the actual facts on the ground, you have no real choice but to believe or not, according to those facts.
I can't just "choose to believe" that I am 9 feet tall or that I am a female or that I can fly by flapping my arms, absent a good reason to believe such things. If I had been told from the cradle that these things are true despite appearances and that I will be rewarded with eternal bliss if I accept them as if they were true ... and threatened with eternal punishment if I did not ... I would probably claim I believed and repeat the assertions to others. But is that really belief?
But once you had the reasoning powers and perspective and data in place, did you really have any choice but to not believe that which was without merit?
I choose to believe that all this is just a semantics dust up...or did I really have a choice to believe that?
This argument is akin to the one which poses that all your seeming experiences and perceptions are mere imagination and that the apparent reality does not actually exist. In such circumstances I tend to fall back on pragmatism. I start with the supposition that all is imaginary, and quickly discover that there is nowhere to progress from that. Whether it is imaginary or not, I must treat it as though it is real.
Whether the rock hits the glass pitcher or the glass pitcher hits the rock, the result is bad for the glass pitcher. Whether someone chose to believe, or was compelled to believe, they are stuck with the consequences of belief.
I would suggest that the latter sort of person doesn't truly "decide to believe". They "decide to accept" unsubstantiated assertions. It is submission to an authoritarian assertion under threat of eternal damnation or perhaps (in more liberal groups) just the threat of group rejection or lack of full fledged belonging.
No one truly "decides to believe". They are convinced, or not. A person telling themselves that the Bible or their authority figures are right and will reward them for agreeing is not the same thing, qualitatively, as being convinced based on evidence. However, they are similar enough that believers and unbelievers regularly talk past each other, using significantly different meanings for the same terms (such as "believe" or "faith").
Yeah, the "seems to be a choice" part probably needed a bit of an explanation. More than what seemed good in my own head.
I was trying to convey an additional step (of my own thinking, not necessarily what you are suggesting) that the seemingly chosen belief would seem to be a choice, to the believer, as they have some awareness that their belief is rooted in unconscious self-preservation...and not because they have been convinced. Of course, there are those who haven't heard the skeptical arguments....and are very much convinced...so my premise is for those who have and still "believe".
It's one of the reasons I think it will eventually (perhaps beyond my lifetime) become more common to refer to "belief-positions", as we do with "knowledge-positions", as we unravel the intricacies of why we think, what we think.
Perhaps it's just my own musings or confirmation bias.
Well, when I was young, I believed there was a god, because that was what my family told me. I just found him to be contradictory and illogical, and therefore religion was a boring annoyance to me. Once I understood the concept of agnosticism and later of atheism, I was like "OH, that's where I fit!"
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