You cannot choose what you believe because you either believe it or not. E.G. Say it was suddenly “cool” to believe that the sun was a cube. Everyone is going around sayin- “yeah dude its like a big cube man” These people claim they believe it is a cube yet it is not a belief it is a statement. Heres another one A bully or influential person tells you that the sun is a cube and you agree to: claim to believe it. The same applies to passed down religion- in my opinion. I think its odd- I do respect religion and people cannot be blamed for raising their children to believe insomething but at the same time…
it should be done with descretion. Also many communitys/groups do not appear to make a distinction between tradition and belief.
so to summarise:
I think…
You either believe something or you dont- its not up to you or anyone else. And it is, in the relevent sense impossible to manipulate youself.
If acatholic priest TRUELLY believed in HELL he would not molest children!
If Bin Ladens beliefs were in accordance with the Qu’ran he would not have done the shit he did. the list goes on…
I don’t think you can choose directly, but their is a certian method of self conditioning that can work.
Actually it is an interesting phenominon that the belife of others can affect our belife. For a very simple example if someone in a room starts scracthing compusively this behavior will spread until everyone is scratching, and beyond that the people will actually feel an itch. Eventually it will come around to affect the first guy -the faker- and he will be caught in his own trap.
I imagen the same would work with the whole “sun is a cube” thing. People especially young people will definately consider the proposition more carefully:
The sun is terribly bright and hard to stare at… I mean all these sane and important people say they see it… oh, I think I saw a cornener.
And eventually even this could come back around to the liers. I mean isn’t that the story of L. Ron Hubbard? Thought he’d control some nuts by makeing a religion, but the nuts ended up convinceing him of his own story.
Dr Projectile,
I think what you’re trying to summarize is that we always act according to our beliefs. That is true. So if someone hurts or abuses another as in the case of your examples, I feel that these are the very people who do not believe in God because if they did then they would cherish all people, respect them and not abuse them, for God advocates respect for all of our kind. But the fact that they don’t means that God is just an excuse to fool the others, in their heart they have concluded that God does not exist and so sinning does not seem wrong in their eyes.
As to the quote, “Actions speak louder than words,” they are not your words so learn to put those words that are not yours under quotes please!
interesting…What made me decide to start this topic was rading Rene Pascal, who is a shit hot philosopher (check out his paradoxes). He was talking about the catholic church(not only him but other people, facts etc.) and it just seems like such a huge pretense for so many people. Its almost like when your kids and you all pretend to be pirates after a while you get deep and you all roleplay. Everyone knows everyone else is full of shit- but its a game. And childrens games like pirates/catholicism(in general) end in tears and start with pecking order. Ok so you CAN choose certain beliefs in a way (that i concede). Right…were talking about people fooling themselves…You cant really fool yourself…can you? damn. This is difficult
Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But its been pretty well shown other people can get most people to belive or at least assent to most anything. There was an experiment done where a group of people where asked to choose which line is longer out of a set of three, exept 19 out of the 20 were plants that were told to choose the same wrong answer. In most of the trials, the non-plant went anlong. Now its hard to tell from an outside perspective wheater the person stated seeing the lines that way, or weather he just didn’t want to stick out.
But let me suggest, a la Wittenstien, that language is use. And let me furthure suggest that most of the world we interact with is language. So if your assent/dissent patterns to such statements as “God exist” perminately change, then thats pretty much whats important.
The differeance, I would suggest, between an RPG and Catholocism, is that no one will ever say, ‘Its just a game.’ Thus the use is oviously different, there isn’t the all important context of fiction. Well, unless maybe your Italien or something.
All i will say on this topic, is that your beliefs and your belief system is entirely based upon your understanding at that current point in life. For example, everyone beleived that the earth was flat, but over time, we understood how it couldn’t be true, and now we believe it is a sphere. At the moment we are 100% sure it is a sphere, but werent we 100% sure back then that it was flat? Over time after understanding new things, you replace old beleifs with new ones, which proves you CAN choose what you beleive. If you couldn’t, then when new understanding occurs, you would be stuck with old beleifs.
Light and love, Imohtep