[Scott Bakker]

Well the psychology of belief seems to be universal - we all seem to fall into the same traps, no matter what culture we hale from. This suggests that it's innate.

I gotta hunt down that neurology of believers stuff. Someone told me they even had something on it in Time...

[Gary Wassner]

I wonder if those neurological differences are the results of neurological activity or whether they are genetic differences. As results, they wouldn't shed much light on what we are talking about here.

More likely, our desires are inspired by physiological and environmental issues that we will probably never be able to isolate. Though we could begin to test some of these things on cloned humans. (LOL) This might be the wrong thread to bring something like that up, right?

[clockwirk]

Well, it's not either/or, but otherwise, why do you have to believe 'in something,' Clockwirk? Why not simply live in doubt?

Look at science, which, because it's institutionally structured to take advantage of doubt, is in a continual state of flux, is continually adapting itself to new curveballs, and is continually generating new and extraordinarily powerful claims (which it will most certainly replace in due course). Doubt does begets learning and understanding. That's what makes it the engine of science's success.
But these "curveballs" that science so easily adapts to are based on facts and observations. At the basic level the scientist believes in his observable facts. He believes that what he sees and measures actually has a bearing on reality. He has faith that his senses and intellect are enough to understand the system even though they are a part of that system. Science doesn't live in "doubt".
You can philosophize all you want, but nobody truely live in "doubt". How could you function?

Religions tend to shut these things down, often in flabbergasting ways. I'm always curious as to the number of contradictions believers seem able to digest without batting an eye (as I said, we're quite horrible at belief-formation). For instance, is there freedom of speech in the Kingdom of Heaven? Isn't hell simply a concentration camp and body-oven rolled into one?
Now who's anthropomorphizing?

[alison]

There's a very wide spectrum of certainty and uncertainty; it's not as simple as a simple question of whether one "believes" or not. You can be "certain" that the sun will rise tomorrow without having to believe in God. That's a fairly reasonable supposition drawn from empirical experience that, yes, the sun rises in the morning (though the inaccuracy of human perception is built into that expression, since the sun doesn't "rise" at all).

The desire for certainty is a fairly predictable response to the uncertainties and challenges of modernity, I guess. Its emergence into various fundamentalisms - Christian, Hindu, Muslim &c (once it was Marxism and Nazism) - troubles me deeply. As soon as someone knows they're "right", that means someone else is "wrong". Tolerance becomes a no no. I look at the Fundamentalist Christian Right in the US with complete incomprehension - I can't see, from my secular, rationalist viewpoint, any point in common, since rational argument has nothing to do with it: in fact, rational argument is, according to some texts I have read, the "work of Satan", since such argument destabilises the Certainty of God. According to some of those people (have a look at the current Salon.com) I should be put to death (I had a lot of sex and all my children before I was married). It's insulated against counter-argument, because it is about "belief". This kind of thing stretches my tolerance...and it certainly has no time for people like me, who are damned anyway. But what can a religion be if it demands that its adherents forgo their intelligence? I hasten to say that religion is responsible for very many huge intellectual achievements, and I'm not saying all religion is like that: but blind faith is a very dangerous thing.

[alison]

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

"I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."


--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

[JRMurdock]

The group probably least likely to ever accept are the ones that grew up with domineering or apathetic fathers. They tend to have an extremely difficult time picturing a heavenly "father" as being the embodiment of love.

Ok, here's one for you.

My father is Native American. My step-father was just an ass. I wasn't raised in church as my dad decided when I was born that if I was to find God, it would have to be on my own. He never fully believed in the Native American gods and didn't want to impose a 'God' on his children.

Therefore I question everything. I question why a God from the middle east is right and the Hindu are not right. They'e been around just as long. Why aren't the Budhists right? They live in greater peace than our warring bretheren. Why aren't the mormons right? Just because God said he wasn't talking to us anymore, does that mean he really didn't talk to Smith?

If a person today says he's spoken with God,does that make him a heritic or a savior?

So I ask, what makes one religion more right than any other religion and do you view all other religions as heathens for not believing the same way you do? The Aztecs were slaughtered by 'God fearing men' for being heathens and beneath the word of God. Same with the Native Americans. Atonement does not come for killing in the name of the Lord.


And yes, chefie, I'm VERY glad I invited you to the fray. :)

[Gary Wassner]

You are so right Alison. Most of us would be condemned as heretics for what we write, let alone how we live our lives, if this was a different era. I don't believe that we are evil and seditious and dangerous. But we would have been considered so according to the leaders of the church many years ago. We must be as well by fundamentalists today as well. The lips may be soft but the teeth of religion are sharp. And historically, they have bitten harder than most any other institution, except perhaps National Socialism. And where were the church fathers then? Where was the church Father?

Maus, if a person says he has spoken with God, doesn't that make him crazy?

[JRMurdock]

The fact that the 'church' has changed its stance over the ages has always made me question. Why would the church change to the will of men if God was right the first time around? Just because society has changed doesn't mean God has. The church changing its rules to be more accetable to men seems wrong to me. It tells me that they were wrong all along and what else are they wrong about.


This bring up another touchy subject.Why does the Vatacin hide so many documents? According to many a source, there were many other books of the Bible about the life and times of Jesus that were left out because they made Jesus appear 'too human'. What's up with that? Why not get everything out in the open and stop the debate over what the church is hiding? Unless it damns the church and ruins its existance. Then they've got soemthing to hide.

Ok, I'm a conspiracy theorist. :D

[Gary Wassner]

It may be a matter of authenticating the documents. The church has developed an infrastructure like no other institution on this planet.

The US constitution is often spoken of as a living document. Does that term apply to scripture as well? And should it or shouldn't it?

I want to amend my previous comment about talking to God. Many people talk to God and that does not make them crazy at all. It's when they claim that God replied that I begin to worry.

[Miriamele]

People who claim that God talks to them aren't necessarily crazy, I don't think, but they do have very active imaginations. Honestly I think this is just a case of somebody believing that their own thoughts in their head are somebody else's. (Wait a minute, that does sound kind of crazy...)

I hate to bring up my dad again, but he is one of these people...sometimes he tells me about how he was praying and then God said to him "Okay, this is what you should do..." And he goes on in great detail what God explained to him. It's really rather silly. I want to tell him "Don't be ridiculous, that was just your own thoughts in your head" but such "conversations" mean so much to him that I don't want to rob him of his joy over them.

You hear this kind of talk a lot from fundamentalist preachers, the kind on television. They're always saying that God said this or that to them, they were eating breakfast when God told them what to do that day, etc. It sounds incredibly odd to the unbeliever but to those preachers' followers I suppose it gives them a great deal of credibility. The funniest thing though is when they say that God told them to ask for money, or that God told them they're going to get a lot of money, or that God will bless the people in the audience if they decide to give them money, and so on... :rolleyes: :)