Politics is not a good analogy for religion at all. If I’m talking about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, I’m talking about real people. They have an objective existence in the real world. I might argue against their political views but I can’t deny they exist. God is not like that.
Let’s say I refuse to go outside at night and you ask me why. I explain to you that vampires hunt at night and kill people so it’s only safe to go outside during the daytime when vampires are sleeping.
Do vampires make me stay inside? No. My belief is what makes me stay inside. While my belief may be real, my belief does not mean vampires are real. My belief is entirely formed inside my head; I’ve never been given any evidence that vampires exist. There is nothing in the real world that I can point to to support my belief in vampires.
I’m not at all sure that susceptibility to the religious experience, and the sort of religiosity potentially linked to agreeableness and conscientiousness, are at all the same thing.
Many prophets appear to have been found quite disagreeable by large parts of their societies. And I think it’s quite possible to be a person who has religious experiences, but who is not a member of any organized religion.
Well, I am not one of these “anti-Christians”. I rejected the religion of my upbringing not because I pride myself on being capable independent rational thought. I am not the least bit ashamed to say that I was heavily influenced by my environment, including this here message board! As soon as I was exposed to compelling arguments against the existence of God, it was rather easy for me to let go of Christianity. No great deliberation on my part was needed, and I’ll be first to admit that.
Even when I called myself a Christian, I didn’t feel it very much. As a kid, I definitely felt the fear that others wanted me to feel. Fear of disappointing God. Fear of hell. But I didn’t feel all the warm and fuzzies I was supposed to feel. You know, the feelings that Christians seem to think are essential for earning a place in heaven. I believed in God but I couldn’t love him. Not even a little bit. All that fear actually made me hate him. Perhaps if I were wired differently and I could feel that love, I’d still be a believer. Who knows.
I agree with you that a lot of agnostics/atheists act like they came to their lack of belief through some great deliberative rational process. I agree that those people are deluding themselves. Do you agree with me that believers also delude themselves when they act like their faith is a choice they consciously made? Do you share my disgust when believers act like all that is necessary to have faith is just to read the Bible and go to church and pray?
It’s not different, that’s my point. People don’t come to any of these things through free will, but through social programming and their own inborn predilictions. Parents teach their children certain values and enforce these lessons through incentives and punishments so that when they are adults, the values are automatic. A parent wouldn’t do this kind of training would be neglectful. They would be sending their children out into the world without knowing right from wrong, correct? Everyone is programmed with morality. When people are not properly programmed, either through failures in home-training or through brain defect, they often wind up to be fucked-up individuals. When I see people doing bad things, I immediately go to these explanations rather than “BAD PERSON MAKING BAD CHOICES!!”
When people say they came to their beliefs through free will, they are essentially denying that they were programmed through years of parent/cultural indoctrination. They are also denying they could very well have a biological disposition that makes holding those beliefs easy for them. I believe that either/both of these things are sufficient to explain why some people are religious and others are not. No “free will” explanation is required.
Whenever we discuss free will, everyone seems to come to the table with their own idiosyncratic definition. Christians especially. If your definition of free will was widespread, we would not expect to see so many Christians asking God to guide their and their loved ones hands (or give them strength and clarity or whatever beseeching you want to substitute). Through the years, I have heard Christians use their concept of free will to rationalize why God must remain invisible and indifferent to human suffering. The thinking goes, if God made himself visible, we would all believe in him and listen to him and thus be no different than boring robots. And if God suddenly stopped all suffering, we would all believe in him and listen to him and thus be no different than boring robots. I think both of these ideas are bananas. Free will doesn’t make sense whether you inject God into the picture and or leave him out altogether.
But all of them find people who accept and respect them, since otherwise they would not be known as prophets but as crazy people.
Yes, the millions of people who identify as “spiritual” but not religious. These people don’t go to church, but they will still argue with you that insert your diety of choice exists as sure as the day you were born. Maybe these people likely score higher on agreeableness than they do on conscientiousness. I know that back when I was first coming to terms with my agnosticism, I told people I was “spiritual” because I didn’t want people to think I was an “anti-Christian” (sensu Corry El) or an evil atheist.
I don’t disagree with you, but I am failing to see why that is an important distinction. Sure, you can prove that a bullet will damage your body, while at the same time I cannot prove that vampires will eat me if I go out at night.
But the belief would cause me to stay in at night, just like you would withdraw money from the ATM if someone pointed a gun at you. The coercion, to the individual, is the same.
I could argue that you could make the choice to believe that you are impervious to bullets. You could argue back that such a thing would be absurd because you can point to real world evidence that bullets are harmful to the human body. However just because my believe in vampire-munching is not based on real world data, it is just as real to me as anything else. I could no more get rid of that belief than you could.
I think a good add-on the gun-to-the-head analogy is the fact that some people are not persuaded by guns to the head in certain situations.
We see this with bank robberies. Gunman enters a bank and commands everyone to get on the floor. Usually everyone complies. But occasionally there’ll be that guy who doesn’t listen. Maybe he’s got his own gun and he shoots the guy. Maybe he runs out of there. Maybe he goes balls-out and attacks the gunman with a sockful of quarters. Not today, he says.
Does the fact that some people will never get on the floor mean that holding someone at gunpoint isn’t a coercive action?
Teaching people that hell is waiting for them unless they do X is coercive. Just because some people don’t respond to this message doesn’t mean that no one is constrained by it.
OK, and it is OK IMO that people do this. Humans are social animals whatever their beliefs. Also it’s not all one or the other. People do in some practical sense of ‘free will’ choose to adopt various beliefs. It’s not all what they were taught.
Like many such statements ‘believers’ here may not only mean ‘Christians’ but some specific Protestants. I’m Catholic. There’s a concept of reason behind faith in Catholicism, but I don’t think there’s a broad pretense that Catholics in general came to the religion after a ‘fair’ competition among all religions or even Christian sects. Probably 50 generations of my family along some lines were Catholic. Obviously that has something to do with it, and my wife too though in her family it only goes back to her father converting to Catholicism (in a very different cultural background than mine otherwise). But while it’s possible you’re more free thinking than we are, I think it’s also possible we thought about as freely as you about our faith as adults and just made a different decision. Also AFAIK Catholicism has no concept saying you will have faith because you read the Bible and go to church. We believe one’s faith is better informed if one reads the Bible (and Catholic teaching outside it) and also one should go to church. But the part about faith necessarily being generated just by doing those things, I don’t think so.
Yes, again partly. And religion nothing special in that regard.
I don’t think it’s idiosyncratic. The meaning of ‘free will’ in Christian context, where you believe there is a sentient God, is that God doesn’t make moral decisions for you. Which does make complete sense in that context. If ‘praying for guidance’ meant that God really made the decision for you, then everyone’s decisions would be righteous all the time. But they obviously aren’t so clearly ‘pray for guidance’ doesn’t mean God actually makes the decision. If there’s a perfect God and imperfect people, there must be free will, under that set up.
Under the assumption there isn’t that kind of God (but rather a ‘watchmaker’ God of Western deism, a vague Heaven/God as in Confucianism where a ruler could have or lack ‘the mandate of heaven’ but it’s still not a specific God, many imperfect Gods like the Greeks, no God, etc) then you need a different definition or definitions of free will, which are difficult IMO to nail down.
I’m not saying the first case is ‘the’ definition, just the definition relevant to Christianity as I know it. It’s not a belief that you make decisions in some rarefied atmosphere of pure reason detached from your upbringing, associations, personality traits etc. It’s just that God doesn’t make your moral decisions for you. And again at least in Catholicism (and I think Christianity generally, there’s always some Protestant sect that believes almost anything you can think of, it seems like) ‘praying for guidance’ doesn’t mean God will respond by making your moral decisions for you.
Oh come now, they’re nice people too. This POTUS said so. Of COURSE nice people get a pass. Especially nice white guys carrying firearms and burning crosses.
One may choose to obey or flout their religious training. One may also choose to allow a speeding bullet to enter their body. The latter results will appear before the former can eventuate. Either way, it’s a choice. But if one chooses to send a speeding bullet into MY body, I will object. Briefly. Send a curse my way; I can handle it.
We visited shrines to St Simón aka Maximón in Guatemala and even brought a Maximón home. He’s the saint of dissolution, depicted as a seated black-clad figure in a sombrero and sometimes dark glasses, carrying a staff and smoking a big cigar, with rum jugs at his feet. Worshipers smoke, drink, and fall into a sacred alcoholic stupor. I grok that.
I am probably not going to tackle the rest of your points. But I am at loss here. How do people come to a religious belief without it being taught to them? And how do people choose beliefs? Can you give a concrete example of you doing this?
Perhaps I’m a weirdo, but I have not chosen any of my beliefs. My beliefs have come to me the same way that literacy came to me. Through instruction and experience. I have never sat down and weighed the pros and cons of all the available belief systems out there. No, what happens for me is that one moment I have a set of ideas and notions in my head that were brought to me by my environment and then shaped by my own idiosyncratic weirdness (“Santa Claus is checking his list and he’s checking it twice! And his pal Jesus is helping him!”). And then in another moment, those ideas/notions are adjusted by or replaced with something more palatable to me for whatever reason (“Santa Claus is a myth. Jesus is real, though.”) I did not make a conscious decision to let go of Christianity. It’s just that one moment Jesus seemed like a real thing to me and some time later, he no longer did. One day I woke up and realized that I no longer felt some kind of way about not praying, not going to church, or saying the lord’s name in vain. I suppose if this realization had bothered me enough, I would have been compelled to go back to church and double-down on my Bible reading. But it didn’t bother me. It actually made me feel liberated. I didn’t choose to be the kind of person who feels liberated by a lack of religious faith.
So perhaps this is why I’m skeptical when people puff their chests out about how much they have “chosen” their religious beliefs. I certainly believe they chose to go to a particular house of worship and do all the things that adherents do when they want to follow a particular religion, although I don’t think those are choices made of “free will”. But no one chooses to be the kind of person who believes a particular thing. A belief either sticks with you or it doesn’t. It isn’t something you can “will” yourself into, IMHO.
So I’m curious if you can come up with a compelling example of you choosing a set of beliefs through an active and conscious process (which is what “free will” connotes to me).
It’s a vast difference because a belief can be changed. A truth cannot be.
If my decisions are being constrained by my beliefs then the entire constraint lies solely within my mind. If I change my beliefs and begin acting differently, there are no consequences for my actions. If I decide one day that vampires don’t exist and begin going outside at night, I will not be killed. And if I decide one day that God doesn’t exist and I can eat bacon, I will not suffer any discernible consequences for doing so. But if I decide that I can fly and jump off the roof of a tall building, the reality of gravity will assert itself and I will plummet to my death. Because gravity isn’t just something I believe in; gravity is something that is true. And its truth exists even if I don’t believe it.
No consequences until you die and don’t make it into Heaven. Sure, no proof and all, but if I believe it, it remains so in my mind.
And so long as I believe that, it is a semantic fiction to say that I can simply choose to believe something else. No more that you could simply choose to believe that gays should not be allowed to marry.
Again, I think we are placing different strength on the definition of “choose.”
Do you think a person can choose to believe he can fly - and then fly?
If you said no (which I assume you did) you’re acknowledging that there are some beliefs that are subject to objective reality. Nobody can fly by believing it’s possible.
The belief that people go to Heaven after they die does not have this objective reality to it. Which means it is not the same kind of belief.
There are beliefs that are based on evidence and there are beliefs that have no evidence to support them. These two different types of beliefs are not the same thing. They are not equivalent.
I apologize because I am still not getting it. You are saying that for the first type of belief, there is objective proof that can convince a non-believer. If I believed I could fly, I could jump off of the third story balcony of a building and quickly find out, if I was a reasonable person, that my previous belief was in error and once I get out of the hospital, my belief going forward will be different.
Whereas with my religious belief, there will be no proof regarding the afterlife, at least none that will be realized on this earth, so it will remain an open question for those who haven’t adopted the religious belief.
But that still doesn’t make the strength of the belief any different for a person of faith. Nobody goes to church and states that they believe in Jesus Christ, but…hey who knows??
People have different drives. It is their choice whether to follow one (e.g., their bodies wanting some type of forbidden stimulation) or the other (the knowledge of religiously-promised reward and/or punishment). Given that even among the most sincere believers, the afterlife is an abstract concept and the physical gratification is concrete, the ability to rationalize following their body’s desire over the stated will of the divine being they believe in is very strong.
Some of them are known as crazy people to all but a handful of followers. Some of even the ones who wind up with a lot of followers are at first known as crazy people to all but a handful. And some, I expect, never get any followers at all; with the result that almost everybody never hears of them.
They may have all had the same sort of religious experience to start off with, though.
Well, I won’t.
I am somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic, depending on what kind of god is being discussed. I have religious experiences, though.
Sure, the immediacy of the consequence will make the decision more stark. If I smoke these cigarettes today, I might get lung cancer in 40 years, but I’ll quit way before then.
It’s easy to rationalize, but again, respectfully, I’m not sure why that makes a difference in this thread. Is the argument that the immediacy of a known harm makes something not really a choice, but if it is something that might come up years later, then we have a freer choice? Like maybe I’ll go to hell for selling this gay wedding cake, but I can always repent later or who knows, maybe this Christianity stuff is mumbo jumbo anyhoo?
Imagine you are tasked by your diety of choice to judge the character of two individuals.
The first individual is Mr. Goodytwoshoes. He has always found it easy to follow the directives in the Bible since he doesn’t have a lustful, covetous, or dishonest bone in his body. He gets pleasure out of helping others. He loves being told that he’s a nice guy. And he feels repulsion at anything he deems naughty. Like, once he saw his wife eating a grape in the produce aisle without paying for it and he felt physically nauseous. He has never even daydreamed of committing mischief.
The second individual is Mr. Baddington. He struggles to follow the directives in the Bible and most other codes of conduct. For one thing, he has a very strong sex urge. He can’t look at a woman without thinking about sex. He wanted to wait till he got married to have sex like a good Christian, but he just couldn’t hold out that long. And because his sex urge is so strong, he cheats. A lot. He has other “bad” urges too. He is a compulsive shoplifter and liar. He feels awful whenever he does these bad things, and he always prays for hours afterwards for heavenly guidance and strength to do better. He has also been in Christian counseling for several years. His behavior has improved somewhat over the years. He used to cheat on his wife every week. Now it is every month or so. He used to steal every day. Now he only steals once a week or so. But the urges have never diminished. He is constantly thinking about sex, stealing, and lying and constantly trying to distract himself from these thoughts. His doctor thinks he should consider medication because it is obvious to her that he is suffering from an impulse disorder, but Mr. Baddington refuses–believing he has a defect of spirit, not biology.
As the judge, who do you think has demonstrated better character? The guy who does good because he is wired for goodness, or the guy who works hard every day to be good and frequently fails?
Do you think the two have the same amount of free will?