This conversation seems to be derailing, so I would conclude one’s claim to know what believers really believe ‘deep down’ is bunk. I can tell Graham Lawton is a man of strong conviction, but fighting faith with even more faith is probably not the best idea.
Christians are everywhere on message boards in my country. Born in Constant(z)a on the Black Sea coast, I live in Bucharest, Romania, a country where 90% of the population is Christian. As soon as I become active on a Romanian message board and get identified as a non-Christian, a war of attrition ensues. It’s like 1 deer against 9 hungry wolves, where a lot of these “Christians” gang up and keep disparaging, ridiculing and taunting me until I no longer have the time and energy to participate in any discussion. And then I’m labeled a coward, which proves all their claims have been right all along.
It’s pretty much what can happen to a Christian on this board as well. In fact, I have invited a good friend of mine (yes, unavoidably most of my friends are Christian people) to participate in the discussions on this board but he declined my invitation by invoking the aggressiveness of many of the so-called “rational” people here, as he put it. A lot of atheists don’t realize it, but their discourse often shows just as much faith as any believer’s discourse. And the arrogance stemming from their belief that a non-believer is automatically smarter than and superior to a believer is simply embarrassing.
Now, back to Graham Lawton, who once interviewed Noam Chomsky. I prefer Chomsky to Lawton not because I share his political views but because he’s a rigorous thinker whom you never expect to hear claiming to know what someone believes ‘deep down’. I think anybody engaged in fighting ignorance should show adequate equilibrium and reason.
Yes, the deathbed conversion is not only accepted, it is celebrated.
And more on the OP’s topic, the flavor of Christianity I grew up in was Southern Baptists, who believe “once saved, always saved” and that at the moment Jesus enters your heart and you have a permanent qualitative change, being a “new person in Christ.” With this comes the unspoken provision that being a True Christian is always provisional–since a True Christian is fundamentally changed forever, if someone falls away from Christianity and stops believing, then to process that cognitive dissonance, it must be assumed that the person was never “saved” in the first place. So in a way, those who convert on the deathbed are the truest Christians at all because they have the least time to renige and be unChristianed retroactively.
I am very, very, very far from an expert in this. So I’m seeking understanding here, not debating your points.
ISTM that the “once saved always saved” doctrine would imply just that. IOW, if I think I’ve accepted jesus into my heart and later change my mind and behave (or believe) like a heathen there’s no conditionality about it. I’m still saved. I’m now a person confused about my beliefs, but I’m still saved because I believed once upon a time and salvation is permanent.
Because all this ignorant bunk is ultimately arbitrary it has no requirement to be logically consistent. Kinda like the tax code. But it becomes a bit more … believable … at least to me if it doesn’t have glaring logical inconsistencies lying exposed on the very surface.
Nope, because once you are saved, you are literally a new person. They don’t mean that metaphorically, they mean that an aspect of Jesus is literally inside you now, and you are now someone else, forgiven for everything that happened before you became a Christian. You don’t and can’t turn your back on that. Therefore, anyone who leaves Christianity was never a True Christian in the first place.
Not everybody.
Cool, thanks.
Which is certainly a convenient doctrine. Sorta akin to the no true Scotsman argument. Like most other woo: if it didn’t work that’s just proof you didn’t believe enough.
We can’t know what ANYBODY believes deep down.
I suspect that both believers and atheists have moments when they question what they think they believe. A devout Christian will have crises of faith, but will USUALLY overcome them. A militant atheist may have occasional experiences that cause him to wonder if there is something super natural at work… but eventually, he’s likely to shake his head and laugh at how silly he was for thinking that way.
I think if you’re intellectually curious, you aren’t positive positive about your beliefs and acknowledge the possibility that other beliefs are as valid as yours. There is some social pressure to put on a façade of religiousness so a lot of people go through the motions. I suspect in any church there is a mix of the genuinely religious and façade religious. Probably true of all faiths in all cultures. Shy of mind readers being genuine and/or truth serum being administered, I don’t think you can know.
I’ve always wondered what people mean, and what they feel, when they say that they’ve felt God’s presence, had Jesus in their heart, heard the voice of God speaking to them, etc.
I’m sure that at least some of them are speaking sincerely when they say they have felt these phenomena. But I don’t get it.
One possibility that I would suggest is that most people don’t believe anything. The question is about as relevant to the situation as asking what cats think about nuclear deterrence.
I was watching a TED talk a few weeks ago where a woman was describing an AI that had been built to take college entrance exams. One area that it would regularly fail at was questions that required some amount of understanding of context. All it could really do was look for keywords and make some inferences on how often those keywords appeared. It would often get the right answer but, at the same time, because it had no actual understanding of what anything meant, it couldn’t fundamentally answer correctly if the question didn’t correlate well to a ‘cheat’ mechanism for answering.
Well okay, that seems fair. The problem is, it performed better than something like 60% of humans.
Another bit of research that I have heard of is a study where two groups were asked to take the same test. One group would always perform better because the test was written in a difficult to read font that was faintly printed on a murky background. The group that had an easy to read test performed worse. The reason for this, it’s hypothesized, is that people’s brains are usually mostly asleep. Thinking takes energy and, pre-modern times, food was scarce so thinking regularly was counter to survival. You only really wanted your brain active if you really needed it, otherwise it has a sort of stasis mode that performs repetitive acts well and can respond based on a sort of lazy logic to most situations. But unless you force it to wake up, that’s what you’re going to get for most people, most of the time. The hard to read test couldn’t be handled by the lazy system, and so the full brain had to wake up just to interpret the words on the page, and so long as it was there, it actually tried to solve the problems in the test.
But I think it’s also clear that this is not true of everyone. There are some people who have a brain that is always or usually on. I would suggest that this was a sort of evolutionary outsourcing. Rather than have everyone smart or everyone stupid, the occasional person will be ‘aware’ and manage most of the others. That one person will consume more food, but they’ll also be in a position of respect and so be able to collect his dues from the rest of the pack.
For this system to work, though, you really sort of need the people who aren’t active to be pliable. The default state of the lazy system could, after all, be to instantly veto anything. But that would immediately destroy the whole hierarchical system. Instead, the default is for blind obedience. Only in times of crisis would the people need to wake up on their own and question whether the leader was issuing good directives for the people.
So, do people believe in God?
Yes, if the social hierarchy that they have ended up in has ordered them to be. Put that same person into an atheistic cult in Norway and they’ll pretty quickly be telling you that they never believed in God, and you should stop trying to press them on the issue.
It’s hard to put into words, because it’s not like anything else. It’s a feeling of joy, oneness of and with all things, that you’re seeing everything fresh and new for the first time (hence the phrase, “born again”). William James talked about it a lot in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Sage Rat, is there any evidence that smart people or leaders use more calories than stupid people or followers? No cite, but I’m under the impression that, awake or asleep, thinking hard or not, the brain uses the same amount of energy all the time.
Speaking as a super-overconfident atheist, I can with absolute confidence say that I can’t read minds. In fact my own father bamboozles me with his mixture of seeming disinterest in religion and occasional spurts of apparent faith. And if I can’t read him, who can I read?
These two articles provide a few metrics:
http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-much-energy-does-thinking-use
Stripping out a few factoids:
- A 3X difference in calorie usage per minute can be seen comparing an anesthetized brain to a normal brain.
- A difference of 15X can be seen, however, comparing an awake brain to a heavily thinking brain. (0.1 calorie per minute versus 1.5)
- Averaged over the day, however, a person who had a brain-heavy day (e.g., tests all day) probably only spent 20-50 more calories than usual.
- People with a higher IQ tend to spend more calories per minute on problems that are difficult to them, than people with a lower IQ.
I presume that your impression came from #3 above.
I’d really want to read the original studies that these numbers came from to say anything but, as stated, I can see wide latitude for doubt on how meaningful #3 is. I could easily see a person defining a “day of thinking” as a “day with an exam at school” and then calculating that an hour of at 1.5 c/m would be 90 calories, but probably most problems would be easy and some amount of time would be wasted just circling bubbles, etc. so that you’d probably only hit half of that number at most. Ergo, a “thinky day” is only 50 calories harder at most.
But if the 1.5 c/m versus 0.1 c/m discrepancy is correct, then we would really need to asking is what a person’s baseline is and how often and for how long are they in deep thought?
Doing some math, if the average daily brain expenditure is ~400 calories per day, then clearly someone’s doing some thinking. A sleeping brain would presumably be consuming 0.0333 calories per minute. After 6 hours, that’s 12 calories. For the other 18 hours, if you’re only consuming 0.1 calorie per minute then, adding in the 12 calories from sleeping, would only have used 120 calories.
The average calorie consumption of the brain, that we would expect, is 0.36 calories per minute, not 0.1. That would get us to 400 calories per day.
Let’s pretend that the world doesn’t accept distributions and just split a group of hunter gatherers into two groups, smarties and dummies. The smarties are 20% of the population and the dummies are the remaining 80%. We’ll say that the dummies are, on average, twice as active as the awake-time minimum at 0.2 c/m. This would make the smarties be burning at an average of 0.4 c/m to equal 0.36 average between the two groups.
In a day, the smarties would burn a total of 8,652 calories over the course of the day (including 6 hours of sleep). The dummies (all 80 of them) would only double that number at 17,292 calories.
Let’s say that our tribe of 100 members wants to be able to stay in an area for 2 months (60 days) before having to move on. This means that there needs to be 2000 calories * 100 people * 60 days worth of calories (12 million) available within walking distance.
Of that, the dummies are consuming 1,037,520 calories to support their brains (roughly 1/12th). If we raise the dummies up to the same level as the smarties, then the total energy requirements double. We’ve just added another 1/12th on top of the current food requirements for this group to survive. The amount of time that they could have stayed in the region will be reduced equivalently.
But it should be noted that adding a 30 minute test that bumps one of these two groups up into the full 1.5 c/m burn rate, for thinking, would not greatly affect the total burn rate for that person that day. It would be in the dozens of calories. Item #3 is preserved.
I tend to believe everyone deep down inside knows there is a God, anything beyond that is just a exerciser of free will which is only allowed by the comfort that God is all loving and accepts everyone for who one is. It is in this comfort that there is such a God that one can believe whatever they wish.
I would say this is extremely common among numerous social contexts. It seems that for groups that are very committed to something, like politics but sometimes even some really strong hobbies or whatever, there’s tendency to deny that anyone who was in the fold ever left it.
Whenever anyone tells me they “know” there is a god, I get very frightened. You can believe whatever you like, but never confuse facts and beliefs.
I think “true” believers are rare in the US. The 9/11 hijackers I’m confident were true believers.
If my family members found out for certain that I was going to be kidnapped by an organization that was going to inflict great torture on me and they knew I didn’t believe it, they would do everything they could to convince me that I have to be very careful. They would do everything in their power to protect me. They would get experts to convince me these people are plotting to capture me. Hire people to protect me. My sister wouldn’t be able to sleep at night and she would be so anxious and sobbing. My brother would be bringing weapons to my house, etc.
The majority of my family and extended family claim to believe than non-believers are going to Hell. An eternity of horrific suffering. Yet these same family members that I don’t doubt love me, pretty much get a chuckle over my atheism. They’re not getting together and talking of having experts talk to me, having an intervention- they’re not doing anything to stop me from a fate even worse than temporary torture or seem to be losing any sleep over it. I wonder why that is?
Would those tactics work on you?