The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played....

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I’d like to start with a small introduction, as I am new to the forums. I am 21 years old, I live in Colorado, and I have a passion for learning. Much of my attention more recently has been captured by science and the controversy of evolution, as well as atheism and the debate of God and religion.

I have perused the forums for a few days now, and although I did notice the forum specifically for rants, I thought it better to make my introduction here along with a philosophical rant.

In the past year, I have reached a very unfortunate realization. It appears that throughout the history of mankind, we have been deceived into believing that we are all entitled to our own beliefs. We have been taught that we must accept one another’s beliefs, and respect one another’s beliefs.

Of course, it has not always been this way, and in many places and situations, it is still not this way. Throughout history, people have been persecuted for their beliefs. The reasons behind why we have now reached a point in our race’s history when we push acceptance of each other’s beliefs seem evident when one looks at our past, but I fear the dangers resulting from allowing mankind to believe what they wish, and respect those beliefs, are great.

We all know that beliefs can be dangerous. Somebody who believes that they have been destined by God to fly a plane into a building, taking the lives of thousands, proves this, as do all of the various examples one could list throughout history in which one’s beliefs have lead to the death, suffering, and destruction of our race and our planet. So why are we still allowing people to believe it’s an actual possibility that astrology is real? Why are we allowing our citizens to spend their money talking to psychics on a paid hotline, or to believe that a belief system based on one’s emotions, or how they feel about a certain issue, is just as equally valid as one based on material facts? Although I can’t say such beliefs are only a detriment to society, as many who believe in God and a greater power are certainly more motivated to do good because of this, there have been far more deaths related to religion than any other cause in history. I would argue the overall effects on our race of religion and beliefs based on nothing, has been horrific.

To attempt to shake one of their beliefs is often futile and hopeless, simply because many have beliefs that have no basis, logic, or reasoning behind it. I know there are some on this board who can relate to being one of few who can see this world for what it truly is, and at times it is frustrating, to say the least, to live in a world where many think you’re crazy for not believing what the majority do, while you know everybody else is crazy for believing, essentially, in the equivalent of Santa Clause.

So the problem is, we have an entire planet who believes in things that simply are not true. Then, we have a generation who has been convinced that we should accept one another’s beliefs, as they are all equally valid. A majority of the debate rests upon relativity. I am ranting because I am frustrated. There is no way to convince somebody to believe things that are based solely on material facts, although time and again we have debunked things that are not, and have time and again shown beliefs that aren’t based on fact are false. When will it end? When will people realize to believe something that isn’t based on fact, logic, and reason, is a detriment to the future of our race?

Okay, I am done ranting for now. If you’ve read this all the way through, then thank you. I look forward to hearing your feedback, and also to hearing all of the different viewpoints that members of this community share. I’m sure I’ll be actively participating in the future.

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The whole point of believing something which hasn’t been proven to exist is that you can bring it into existence
Example; if I play a football match and believe I won’t be the winner because I haven’t won yet, then I’m not going to win.
So it is with God - people believe in an all encompassing good reality because it enables them to create that reality. ‘As it is in heaven, so it shall be on Earth.’

Passively believing and thinking that God will allow you into paradise if you just refrain from acting is not realistic. Actively believing, thinking that you will be rewarded for a life full of effort and love for your fellow man, is very much justified.

‘God’ is a name for a possibility. It focusses the will and strengthens the heart. I think all evolution is based on a gamble, a leap of faith.
In any case, it is NOT based on reductionism - that is a certainty.

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Dorky -

Excellent post. Few people have the balls to come out and say, equal respect for all belief systems is ridiculous! In every reasonable, factual light, you are absolutely correct.

It seems to me that there are multiple levels of reasonable truth and belief, from a human perspective.

  1. Logic and math. This is the highest level - if anyone doubts that 1+1=2, they are beyond hope (or, if they’re the kind of hippy who asserts that you can say 1+1=11, they just need to stop smoking pot and get a job).

  2. Positive empiricism. Believing in things we can see. Anyone who doesn’t believe in trees probably should be in a mental hospital. You can doubt the existence of trees in a Matrix / Cartesian sense, but nothing is more sure than “trees exist” except logical and mathematical truths.

  3. Negative empiricism. Disbelieving in things we can’t see. No one over a certain age believes in Santa, because there’s no evidence that he exists, no reason to believe in him. And obviously the point of this is, how is God any different? Simply put, he isn’t. Since we don’t see God, or need the idea of God to explain anything, we shouldn’t believe in him.

When I was young, my parents brought me up without a specific religion in mind, but rather exposed me to all religions and belief systems equally. Naturally I became atheist, because when I learned about religion in the context of “different people believe these different things”, rather than “this is the correct thing to believe”, you’re naturally going to realize that none of them are correct. I was and am naturally very logical, and I am confident that I would have rejected religion by high school even if I had been brought up with it - but others are not so lucky.

So I was thinking to myself, how am I going to raise my children? In today’s overly-accepting culture, it seemed natural to do as my parents did, and expose my children to all possibilities without condemning any of them. But then I thought about using math as an equivalent. Would anyone in their right mind ever teach their children, “some people believe 1+1=2. Others believe 1+1=3. Which do you believe? You are free to believe whichever you like, and whichever you pick, we will support you in your choice.” That, of course, would be ridiculous, because there is obviously a correct answer. Similarly with religion - the obvious correct answer (which, unlike math, we cannot prove, but merely believe with 99.9% certainty) is that physics is the best it gets, and there is no applicability or need for religion as far as explanatory systems go.

So isn’t this the natural thing to do: teach your children that many people believe in many different religions, and teach them about those religions because such knowledge is useful and interesting, but tell them that all those religions are almost certainly wrong, and that there is no good reason to prefer any of them over scientific atheism? The only reason I can now think of for doing anything different is that if my child comes to atheism of his own accord, he will probably have thought out the issue very well, and thus be better equipped to be confident in his beliefs and to argue against the stupid beliefs of others.

So what does “respect for other beliefs” really mean, in a practical sense? Beliefs are either correct or incorrect - presumably we should “respect” the correct ones, and not respect the incorrect ones. That seems pretty clear. I think the only thing one can take from “respect for other beliefs” is, rather, “kind treatment of people with other beliefs”. It is often counterproductive to argue against or bitch against someone with stupid beliefs. It is usually best to tolerate their point of view happily, and not get into a debate. But this is pretty obvious in today’s culture, and easily takes care of “not persecuting others for their beliefs” without the added requirement of truly respecting stupid belief systems.

This goes hand in hand with the credo “do not be judgmental”. If you say that someone is judgmental, it’s automatically a bad thing. I think this is ridiculous. Everyone makes judgments, and everyone should. Judging is not a bad thing. The only thing that is bad is making quick, irrational, and harsh judgments. Someone accidentally steps on your toe, and you think, “what an asshole! I hate that guy!” That’s being judgmental in a negative way - but “judgmental” is really not the appropriate word. “Irrational” IS the appropriate word, and irrationality should always be discouraged. Making effective and accurate judgments - that person has incorrect beliefs, I should do A instead of B even if I prefer B because A is better - those are what it means to be an intelligent, responsible and moral person. And if we’re going to make accurate and rational judgments, that will include the notion that beliefs stand on their own philosophical merit, and cannot be supported by vague catch-alls like “respect and tolerance” that can only reasonably apply to people, and not their beliefs.

“The Death Camp of Tolerance” is an excellent South Park episode that does a good job of mocking the hell out of these retarded ideas. There is a happy medium between tolerance and accurate perception / rationality, and while the Nazis were as strongly on one side as you can get, we’re definitely working our way, as a society, towards the other extreme.

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I guess there’s a fine line, but you can respect a persons right to hold a belief without really respecting the belief.

5

Exactly one of my points. To demand that we respect stupid beliefs is ridiculous. To demand that we treat people well even if they have stupid beliefs is totally reasonable.

6

That works for me.

7

Suppressing belief is almost as bad as encouraging it.

What would be better then intolerance – would be shutting the fuck up, globally. The law of non-preaching, non-propaganda, but as persons cannot draw the line between propaganda and education, there will be literary and auditory madness always within this sort of culture, which simply cannot be rooted out, and instead serves as a potential weapon, as always.

8

This may not be what you’re saying, but, we can’t prove conclusions just by empirical facts, we also need logical principles and definitions.

I also think you may be misusing the word “relative” as many seem to do. Relative things are judged in light of that to which they are relative. I think you may just mean basic truths seem ambiguous or differ between people.

Welcome to the board.

mrn

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Honestly, the world would be a much better place to live if every single culture had the same set of beliefs. Of course every individual has their own, but i’m speaking about belief as a whole.

The reason why is as you were saying, every culture has their own religions and beliefs about existence and justice. Some cultures belief terrorizing is the just way to go, while others believe that killing others is wrong. If the world was united in one set of beliefs than yes, it would be a better place to live in. Is this going to be possible? No. Relatively speaking, you must have some respect for President Bush for trying to unite the world by pursuing America’s belief system onto the middle east so terrorism could possibly be replaced with our culture’s good virtues. Then you could say, well who’s to say that our culture’s good virtues are ‘good’? Well imagine a place where terrorism occured daily. Society would not exist.

Anyway, my point being is that you are right. The only way to solve this problem is to unite everyone’s beliefs to the most promising, virtuous ones.

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I’m not sure, Socrates. It seems to me it is the majority of ordinary decent people in this world who agree on morality. What right would a dictator have to abrogate individual free will in non-essential cases?

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that is because noone knows for sure what is true…so evveryine is free to believe what they want…I wouldn’t like it any other way, I think it’s better this way…
besides… you only progress when you have an ‘adversary’ or a contrasting POV.
so …be thankful to creationism cause that makes evolutionism stronger…
or… be thankful to scientology cause it makes psychology look more like a science… or , i dunno, my examples where lame, but u get my point.

12

Yours is a common mindset, so I am not surprised you hold it, but there are a lot of people who know for sure what is true. I know for sure that if I wake up this morning, by the standard definition of what “alive” is, I’m alive. I know that 1+1 = 2, that we don’t have a cure for AIDS (at least that is widespread and publicly available). I know that even though I’ve never been in Space, there are seven other planets floating up there, and one lonely rock that used to be a planet. :stuck_out_tongue:

There are a lot of things that are “true.” It’s so dangerous to believe that every belief is equally valid. It’s just not. and while it’s true that one does have the ability to choose what they believe, is it not better to choose beliefs that have a positive affect on one’s life? We already control beliefs in a sense that those who normally might think killing is okay might be hesitant based on our laws. Many are forced to believe religion, never reaching a point where they make a choice on whether or not they accept its validity.

I just can’t agree that all beliefs are valid, equal, or even permissible.

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It is possible to determine the absolute truth about whether I am alive under the standard definition, or whether 1 apple +1 apple = 2 apples. It is not however possible to determine an absolute moral absent a higher entity. I could say something like thou shalt not kill. But then you have something like… unless that person killed someone, or raped someone, or whatever. there are always going to be gray areas when you give people the authority to make moral judgements over other people.

While it is true that if you kill and it can be proven that you killed, and that there “was no good reason” for you to kill then you will most likely be punished. No one is in possession of all the facts so who decides what a good reason is and what is not a good reason. Moral absolutes are black and white practice of morality is gray. My question is should it be gray, do we want to live in a world where what is morally true today is different for tomorrow?

14

Now that is an excellently composed, letter-perfect, and well-structured mini-thesis on the causticity of mass, blind belief-systems.

I saw no rants in it. Dork. (lol, your name)

I do have a small nit from one section: “So why are we still allowing people to believe it’s an actual possibility that astrology is real?” Well it is the society (the U.S.) in which we live and upon which the Bill of Rights is based. You cannot dictate beliefs here. “Why are we allowing our citizens to spend their money talking to psychics on a paid hotline?” You cannot legislate against people pissing away their moolah from talking to psychics anymore than you can gambling or the lotterly - where it’s legal. You can become politically active and try; but it is not presently outlawed for them to do so. “Or to believe that a belief system based on one’s emotions, or how they feel about a certain issue, is just as equally valid as one based on material facts?” Bill of Rights and the bar against dictating individual beliefs in this country.

Otherwise, fantastic post indeed - and - moves me to make my own “grand, official introductory post” (right along that same vein I might add) - going up soon. :slight_smile:

-GNJ-

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This is an old thread, but it’s fun; let’s revive it.

Do they? It seems to me that people who THINK they know what is true, with far too much confidence, and act accordingly, cause a lot of trouble. You did mention those folks that flew airplanes into buildings earlier, I believe. Perfect example. The willingness to die for what you “know” to be true is the ultimate test of confidence in that knowledge, perhaps.

Now I’m going to get a bit fanciful, just to illustrate the point I’m making:

How do you determine that your memories have not been downloaded into a neural-net computer, you are occupying a virtual world, and your body is dead? By what test can you falsify this statement?

That depends on the context. Math is a cognitive gridwork placed upon experience, and holds no truth in and of itself. When you are speaking purely within the context of a mathematical system, “truth” is self-referential and purely deductive from original postulates, but in the more ordinary sense of “truth,” it is a question of whether you are applying the right mathematical tools to a given system, as well as whether they are applied correctly.

If you are counting dollar bills in a cash register, then 1+1 does equal 2. If you are predicting population growth, then 1+1, if the right gender mix, age, and personal compatibility, can equal 3, or 4, or more.

These are things that you pull from the media. They are only as true as your sources are reliable. Unless you know someone who suffers from the disease, you don’t know, from your own experience, that AIDS even exists, let alone whether or not there is a cure. The same is true with regard to the planets.

I can agree with this statement, but the danger lies in too much certainty about which beliefs are more valid than others.

Here’s what it comes down to. The flaw in certain religious systems is a fixation of belief and a refusal to question. The same flaw might be found in other things, though. And in all cases, the best cure is a free flow of information, a marketplace of ideas in which all thoughts can be aired freely and discussed freely. To try to suppress beliefs is precisely the mistake made by those who flew those airplanes into buildings.

As Oliver Cromwell once said to an opponent in trying to prevent a battle (unsuccessfully), “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

Good advice for us all.

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One question d0rkyd00d

You kept mentioning god as if you believe in god. Do you?

17

No, he doesn’t.

d0rkyd00d,

I know where you’re coming from but you can’t just throw gods out as totally irrelevant to reality because they are very real. People have good reason to believe in their gods. They’re a high form of symbolism and thought. Something I’ve asked myself is, why do people believe in spiritual powers? Obviously they have their reasons so you might as well understand them and accept them, right? They’re apart of many everyday lives and, hence, must be treated as such. Not just illogical belief systems that are completely outside this world. 'Cause they’re not, not at all.

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It’s fine to be that specific; however, this to me sounds like so much Perspectivism, in which a thing is true or real in its degrees, measurements, and other determinants depending strictly upon one’s perspective or way of looking at things.

I find the extremes of this and related schools of logic to be silly outside the walls of ANY classroom; i.e.: nothing potentially exists, Allegory of the Caves, to some degree existentialism and certainly nihilism, a school of thought whose core postulate is that everything ultimately is meaningless and many tenets of which promote anarchy on a larger, sociological scale.

Hey, my point is that these are all fun intellectual exercises in which we get to romp about and make things seem to be anything or nothing or illusory. Hell, even Quantum Theory, which I love, while relevant on the scale of the quanta, bears extremely little practice use outside the laboratory on the scale of the macro–you know, our size.

String Theory as well – both of these are just fascinating – and most accurately spoken of in the language of very advanced mathematics. Yet this inaccessibility; this abstruseness, makes the ‘innards’ of the former two irrelevant to the general population.

Returning to and tying in my original thoughts, so too with this high-flying, how do you know what you think you know and is it real / anything goes way of seeing our world and the reality around us. To me, it is a desperate stretch to say, ahh but 1+1 can equal 3 or 5 in a population matrix projection.

It skews the original point that we do in fact–at the macro level where we function–live in a world where 1+1=2.

Whatcha think :slight_smile:
-GNJ-

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All of electronics is based on quantum theory. You couldn’t be reading or posting on this thread without it, because there would be no computers. Science, no matter how abstruse and abstract it may seem to the casual eye, inevitably makes a difference.

As for the 1+1 bit, both of the examples I chose – counting dollars in a cash register and predicting population growth – are quite mundane and definitely part of the macroscopic world.

But the original point was flawed, precisely because 1+1 doesn’t always =2 – that is, we are not always operating in a situation where simple, linear addition describes processes. In fact, we rarely are. Investments don’t work that way. Chemical reactions seldom do. Nuclear reactions never do. Politics doesn’t, either. In fact, the number of situations in which 1+1 actually does =2 are few and far between.

If there is one thing the threefold revolution in 20th-21st century physics (relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos) should teach us, it’s that all truths are tentative and uncertain, at best approximations, the best we can do at the time, and not actually “true.” Newtonian mechanics, which was the foundation on which classical materialism was built, is proven false.

In fact, that’s worth some specific consideration. Classical materialism is the belief, not merely that all reality is material, but also that the nature of matter is the mechanistic, “dead” reality described by Newton: a deterministic clockwork in which all human values are fluffy add-ons. Supernaturalism – the belief that material reality is impacted by forces from outside that reality – is a reaction to classical materialism; no religion in its origins subscribed to it, but many came to adopt it.

What we actually see to be true is something that might be called “nonclassical materialism” – perhaps all reality is material, but the nature of material reality is quite different from what Newton envisioned, and that fact must make us sufficiently uncertain of ourselves not to close the doors on the possibility of the strange.

And this brings me to what dorkydood was trying to say with, “at times it is frustrating, to say the least, to live in a world where many think you’re crazy for not believing what the majority do, while you know everybody else is crazy for believing, essentially, in the equivalent of Santa Clause.”

It’s one thing to scrutinize, and quite properly reject, the simplistic God of many people’s theology. It’s quite another to think that in doing so you have dealt with all possible realities underlying religious experience. Atheists and dogmatic theists make essentially the same, or at least an analogous, mistake about God: they think He/She/It can be defined. They think they can wrap their minds around what is far too big to do that with. The dogmatic theist says, “I have the ocean right here in this bottle. This is the true and only ocean, you there on the beach, you’re pursuing a false ocean, this is the real one.” The atheist says, “There is no ocean. All water comes from the kitchen tap. There is no water in that bottle, or if there is, you got it from the kitchen tap and you’re just trying to fool people.”

All the time the real ocean is there, if you can get past this silly argument to find it. You still won’t be able to fit it in a bottle, though.

20

A very common misconception is that somehow something has to be falsified to be disproven. This is where any argument against God falls apart: one cannot disprove the existence of God. In fact, it’s impossible to FALSIFY anything, for there always exists a very minute, even close to infinite chance, that something can happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worthy of discussion. I cannot falsify your statement, but there is no evidence that even points to the claim that I live in a computer, and therefore the idea doesn’t deserve equal time in my thoughts as other, more obvious conclusions one can draw based on the evidence we have.

Once again, I cannot be 100% sure that “AIDS” exists. For all we know, there is an even smaller disease than AIDS that is undetectable that actually causes what we know as “AIDS” to exist, but based on all of the evidence we have, which I’m sure is abundant and plentiful, it does exist, according to our definition of what it is.

This is where we stop living in Descarte’s dream world. Yes, it’s possible that we live in a dream, that nothing is real, and that nothing technically exists. But let’s suppose that within this dreamworld, we create a system, and within that system, we define things. Within that system, it can be said that the things we define exist. They exist because we created them, and within that system, after they are defined and exist, we can build other definitions and existences off of those things. Do I know the planets exist? Well, I know when I look through a telescope and see a giant rock up in Space, it’s either a figment of all of our imaginations that was created in our dreamworld, or they exist to the extent of what our definition of a planet is. The evidence we have is much more convincing that they exist out in space, even when we are not looking, than any other conclusion

Define a “good reason.” I can agree that the beliefs in these gods are real, but I cannot agree that gods are real, based on what science defines as “real.” Science does not define unicorns or fairies as real. I cannot falsify a belief in unicorns or fairies, but science requires that a theory be falsifiable, meaning we know exactly what evidence could prove fairies and elves are fake. When it comes down to it, there is nothing that can affirm these don’t exist, but in science, absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.

Absolutely true. There is seemingly exceptions to every rule. As evolution scientists repeatedly state, it is absolutely possible that a human eyeball, in its current form, could possibly just pop into existence, but the odds against it are so great (much greater than the number of atoms in the universe) that we can rule it out as an impossibility. There are some things that are so statistically improbable, we can rule them out as being impossible, just so we can move on and establish actual facts instead of wasting time on the statistically “impossible.”

Atheists don’t claim to know everything. The more you know, the more you realize you DON’T know. Anybody who’s open minded to possibility can assume this. But just because one doesn’t believe in “god” in all of it’s definitions, doesn’t mean one doesn’t believe in the unknown, or the yet-to-be-discovered. It simply is what it is: a disbelief there is a higher power that somehow cares, even remotely, about the outcome of human life on this planet. I don’t see how one could make the assumption that if one doesn’t believe in God, they do believe they have all the answers in the universe. Far from it.