A pitting of Liberal and the Mods that let it happen.

Marx was way before his time, wasn’t he? (Thanks for the link.)

I hardly see how this comment applies merely to those without faith. Unless, of course, you are saying that the Oral Roberts, Pat Robertsons, and Ted Haggards of the world do not actually have faith.

By their works shall ye judge them?

You can have my part. I have not volunteered and I have no desire to be associated with this nonsense.

I’d be very surprised if any of those gents would equate their belief in The Big Man to their churches, pastors, etc. Different order of ‘belief’ at work, here.

But self-inflicted genital wounds have one key advantage - they’re funnier.

This thread…is… going too… … fast… speach… becoming like… William Shatner.

I think Frank is right on point. There’s another point as well, that makes Liberal’s challenge full of crap. PRR never said that choosing to believe in God is some instantaneous thing. It takes an investment of time, thought and effort. You don’t “choose” to become a Dentist and thus it is so. You go to school, study and practice.

For Liberal to make the ludicrous challenge that PRR should spend massive time and effort in a “choice” to accept God so as to prove that it is a choice is beyond ridiculous. As far as he was concerned that’s like asking him to voluntarily starting a home brainwashing experiment.

ETA: and if you think me and Frank are in a mutual admiration society then you’re more delusional than I thought possible.

What does ETA stand for?

“Edited To Add”.

Liberal, I realise it was several pages ago, but can I get some feedback on how you reconcile logical necessity and a disbelief in parallel universes? To reiterate - I understood logical necessity to mean “true for all possible worlds”, but you used the qualifier “necessarily” and yet poo-poo’d the notion of multiple possible outcomes. Can you explain?

Should that be a GD?

I keep hearing this analogy. I don’t think PRR sold out his principles for cash. I mean, honestly, was he turning believers into atheists here on the SDMB? Did he walk away from all his good works here just for money? I don’t think he or anyone else would say so. I think he saw a way to take money from a looney maroon, and leave a place where he was not communicating well and where he was roundly hated. Did he sell out, or did he just take some idiot’s cash to sweeten his exit, which he might have made (and should have made temporarily) anyway? I think he knew when to fold 'em, and did it $500 richer.

Calling PRR a Judas, even with as good humor as Terrifel used, still isn’t quite fair. JMO.

While my feelings on this financial exchange are pretty fucking harsh, I agree with Lib on an underlying point: I could not, short of engaging in a regimen indistinguishable from brainwashing, choose to believe in God. I could choose to read certain books, I could choose to talk to certain people, I could choose any manner of actions, but I could not choose to draw conclusions from my experiences other than those that I draw.

I have encountered both theists and atheists who disagree (prr, for example, and I think JThunder), and I am honestly not sure whether we’re defining terms differently, whether they or I have an imperfect understanding of how our own minds work, or whether their minds genuinely work differently from mine.

Daniel

OK, Left Hand of Dorkness, try this on for size:

Suppose you are
(1) self-interested
(2) somewhat forgetful
(3) subject to some cognitive bias - that you tend to judge events in a way that makes you feel good and sensible. This sort of thing seems to exist. People revise their probability estimates of their favoured horse winning after they’ve placed a bet on it (for example).

Such a person knowing his limitations might choose to immerse themselves in religious practice because being seen to be a believer would be profitable. Mundane religious rituals can take on symbolic meaning (see my post in this lovely thread for an example). If a person comes to embrace the trappings of religion and forgets his original intention, he could end up being indistinguishable from a believer and we would be entitled to call him one. Cognitive dissonance reduction would lead him to interpret his good fortune as reward for his goodness.

Of course, implementing this choice would take time and involve giving up something of considerable value. And maybe it’s brainwashing - but it’s voluntary brainwashing.

Now, I’m not suggesting this is the greatest argument you’ll ever come across. I threw it together in a few minutes from a little Pascal’s Wager, a little Jon Elster on the subversion of rationality, a little Chinese Room and a bit of cognitive and evolutionary psychology. It has substantial weaknesses (eg the “self-erasing” bit that I covered with forgetfulness is not very convincing at all). I’m sure someone’s made a better fist of it somewhere else.

Nor am I suggesting that belief is always a choice. Children often don’t get the chance to choose. Others are stupid or crazy people. Still others, perhaps, really hear a god talking to them.

The point is that the idea that one could not choose to believe is not obvious. A person claiming that one could choose to believe is not claiming something patently ridiculous that no reasonable person hold to be true.

However, you have rather seriously changed the discussion, at this point.

First, setting up a hypothetical with a lot of different conditions does not meet the claim made by a couple of non-believers that belief is, itself, a choice. It only indicates that under some predefined set of conditions, a choice to take an action might possibly result in one actually coming to believe.

Then, there is the problem that you have not actually shown that the belief was a choice. One may posit that a person is choosing a lifestyle that is congruent with a lifestyle embraced by a believer, but at the point where the person actually comes to believe, there is no indication that that was so much voluntary as simply a mindset that arose in a certain situation:

Note that first the person being examined must, in your scenario, actually forget his or her intention to fake it. Then, you change the standard from whether the person actually believes to an outside inference that the person is ranked among believers without actually knowing the person’s genuine beliefs.

For all practical purposes, the idea that one may “choose to believe” is really pretty ridiculous, whether patently so or modified by some less absolute adjective.

I kind of hoped to cover that with my Chinese Room.

I don’t assume that they intend to fake it. Indeed, if they intended to fake and ended up really believing, that wouldn’t be a choice. Knowing how one’s mind works imperfectly, one could choose now to embark on a regime that would later effect belief. You can choose to get a university degree, right? You don’t get one when you choose, the process of getting one changes you, then you get one. Or would you just say you choose to enrol?

Again, I’m not saying my story hangs together terribly well. It is not my considered view on belief formation. I’m just saying that something like that is a view that could be held by a reasonable poster.

I think I see what you’re saying; our minds are somewhat malleable and we can, to some extent, mould them ourselves.

I should clarify my use of the Chinese Room - that argument is used to critique the position I’m taking for the sake of argument: that a really good simulation is the same as the real thing. Searle’s position is that it’s not. My point in using it is that serious people stand on both sides.

And yes, Mangetout, that’s a fair bit of it. The choices we make are as imperfectly rational actors and we can take that into account to some extent. Our choices can change us, and we can take that into account too.

Well, I concede that at a certain point the analogy breaks down. The map is not the territory, of course. I suggested that reading as an alternative to counter the concern that I’d been comparing PRR to Jesus. Surely everyone should be happy with those two extremes to choose from.

In any case, my earlier quotes were taken directly from the Holy Bible, so if you have a problem with them, that just means you’re not clean in the sight of God. Like it or not, this entire fiasco was clearly prophesied in the Gospel of St. Matthew. It’s up to the various denominations of the SDMB to determine which interpretation is the correct one. And remember, it’s not murder if the Lord tells you to do it.

Actually, the precise role of PRR was tangential to my observation anyway; personally I hope he’s content with his choice, and his neck and bowels are in the same condition they were when all this started. The really important, critical points of the parable were:

1.** Liberal ** = Caiphas

  1. tomndebb = tumult among people

  2. **Frank ** = Simon the Leper

  3. Remember the Mark Goddard Festival, and keep it holy.

If you want a concrete (yet mundane and anecdotal) example of this. My first sip of Guinness made me gag, but I had decided I was going to like it - this process took some time. Today, I genuinely like the stuff.

Yeah, you keep saying that. Back it up. Choose to believe right now. Choose to put your faith in God, to rely on Him and cling to Him. Just go ahead. After all, once you’ve proved your point, you can turn it right back off, right?

It is the limbic system. But it proves nothing:

Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God. — VS Ramachandran, MD, PhD, Phantoms in the Brain, “God and the Limbic System”, pp. 184-185