You are already doing the one thing you can do to gain a closer relationship with God; that is, you are keeping an open mind and you are interested to know more about Him. That, I sincerely believe, is all you need. If God is so fair as he claims, he WILL give you a good reason relative to you on why you (and I say that specifically) should believe. I believe everyone has their chance, but not everyone wants one. Instead, they rather stay with what they’re comfortable with. I say this honestly to you because I believe in God. But I sometimes feel as if my faith isn’t 100 percent. I don’t see how I could ever be 100 percent sure logically, but I believe that God will one day give me my reason to believe. So far, I’ve been keeping an open mind and I’m trying to learn as much as I can. Faith is defined as believing in something that is uncertain, almost like trusting someone. I do not believe it is proper to have faith without reason. To see a person quickly trust someone he just met on the street would make me conclude that he is ignorant, just like it would be to have an all-out faith in “some god” that you know little about. It takes time to build faith: time to build trust. I know that trust evolves over time between humans, and I believe it is the same with my faith in God.
With that said, I’m left to say one more thing. You already have the open mind. You have opened “your door” to let God come in. It is up to Him to take those steps inside, and He WILL take them. But don’t wait; prove to Him that you are really interested. Yes, He already sees your heart, but do it anyway. Keep talking to your friend. Start slow, and one day God will personally show His existence to you.
I’m bummed that I came upon this thread so late. The subject is important to me. In a big paper I wrote for an MA focusing on cultural criticism, the question of whether one can choose one’s true beliefs was crucial. My conclusions really depended on the proposition that there is a distinction between faith and belief. Faith can be chosen to an extent, but true belief is a spontaneous occurrence. Every member of my advisory committe, intelligent people whom I respected, disagreed. They insisted that we can choose to believe whatever we wished.
I was flabbergasted–it seems perfectly obvious to me that we cannot. Of course beliefs change. Evidence appears or is discredited, we learn more, our mental capacities change, and our beliefs change. We don’t choose to stop believing in Santa, it just becomes impossible to continue. I could try to believe again, try to exert faith in Santa, but I would be pretending. I don’t really believe.
I did not choose to be an atheist. I resisted it for years, struggling to believe, not allowing myself to entertain the thought that Christianity and religion in general might be nothing more than a bunch of stories. Eventually I could no longer deny that I didn’t believe the stories.
The committee insisted that I change the focus of my paper, and it turned into some inane drivel that I don’t even remember. They loved it; I got an A. Anyway, well said, DanielWithrow. I wish I had had your coin example back then.
Wow. How did they defend that position? Though I realize, as a student, you weren’t necessarily in a position to demand they do so. I’d be curious as to how they explained that.
I agree with your advisory committee. I don’t understand your position. Why would you believe you didn’t chose to be an atheist.
But, I think I’m beginning to understand. You were taught religion when young and as you grew older and wiser, you could no longer believe the doctrine of religion. So, that meant atheists must be correct. Something like that. OK. But you could have chosen to be agnostic, or just not decided to be anything.
I know there is a creator, a higher power, but I don’t hold to any religion. I use what I like from them and go on. There are not just two paths, there are as many paths as there are people. And yes, we do choose the path we will follow.
To say one doesn’t chose their beliefs is to say one is controlled by outside influences at all times and not responsible for any of their actions. Not a tenable position.
Yet as pointed out to you several times already, whenever a doctor places a visibly distinct object somewhere in the room where it would never be seen physically by the patient, yet would be plainly visible if viewed from above the patient, no NDE experiencer has ever identified the object, or knew it was there, no matter how precicely they describe everything else in the room. The one and only verifiable piece that is known, for sure, to have had no other way for the patient to find out about it, is the only one not found. Funny that, huh?
I saw nothing in the “documentation” regarding the possibility of forming dream-like memories durring the time the brain was starting up or shutting down. Care to give any explanation? Don’t just tell me to read it, I did, and I didn’t find any. Write it out here in your own words for a change.
I question your use of the word “know” in this context. Admittedly, he boundry between belief and knowledge is often fuzzy, but still, I’m curious as to where you, personally, draw the line between what you believe and what you know.
I think it could be better phrased as “people can’t choose to believe any arbitrary thing.” It would be completely impossible for me to believe in, lets say, the Tooth Fairy. Are you saying that you could believe in the Tooth Fairy – actually believe – just because you choose to?
You are correct. Intelligent design, creation, is just as valid a theory as evolution. There are other theories that also have merit. When the truth is unknown, it is unknown.
There is a big difference between science and scientism.
You know something when you experience it, and that’s what happened. I didn’t ask for the experience and I could have denied it. But it was so real I knew it was true. Now if something should happen to shake that truth, then I will have to decide whether or not to keep it.
No one said that choosing your beliefs meant people were obligated to choose to believe any arbitrary thing. Why would you come to that conclusion? While we may talk about theists, agnostics, atheists, they are not clones of each other. Each believes in their own way. They choose their beliefs, no one forces them to believe in either school. At least no one in this country (US).
Again we run into the tenants of scientism, everything must be measurable by science or it doesn’t exist. Sorry, lots of things exist without science being able to measure them.
Take memory for instance, we know it exists. Can’t be measured, can’t be seen, can’t be weighed, can’t even be found. Does a smart person have more than a dumb one? What color is it?
There was no defense, in my judgement. Just disagreement. As you suggest, I couldn’t demand much of anything, but we did discuss it at some length. They simply insisted that they were free to choose their beliefs. To me, the freedom to choose was not in contention, but the ability to choose was. They claimed to have the ability to choose to believe literally in, say, Vishnu, but to have chosen not to. I can’t. When I hit them with things like seeing a black cat and choosing to believe it’s white, they came back with things like our senses being unreliable. Agreed, they are, but they’re what we’ve got to work with.
Well, without getting into the argument about the proper definitions of agnostic and atheist, I suppose I am also an agnostic. Lacking knowledge of God, thus being agnostic, I have no belief in God, which makes me an atheist. I didn’t decide to be either one; these words are just labels we use to indicate people who have certain beliefs. I don’t like to call myself either one, really. I prefer to say that I don’t believe in God. I also don’t believe in lots of other things–leprechauns, for instance. But I don’t identify as an aleprechaunist.
The fact that I cannot choose my beliefs does not lead me to the conclusion that I am controlled by outside influences. I would say that I am controlled as much by inside influences. To oversimplify, the evidence around me is outside; my interpretation of it is inside. I am fully responsible for my actions, the more so since I have no god-concept to blame or credit, no savior to redeem me.
You say that you didn’t ask for your experience. I assume that you can’t deny your experience without feeling as if you are lying to yourself. I didn’t ask for mine–the experience of finding it far more likely that gods don’t exist than that they do. I cannot deny that without lying to myself. Neither of us is choosing.
Memory is an abstract concept, so it surely has no color etc. It exists because people have defined a whole lot of different processes in the brain to be known collectively as ‘memory’.
If you think that, say, God exists only in the same sense that memory exists, I think you and most skeptics are actually in agreemnt.
Science doesn’t measure things. People measure things. If people can’t measure (i.e. detect in some manner) something, then how can one even begin to claim that it exists?
Memories can, indeed, be found. They exist as neuron connections within the human brain. And of course they can’t be seen or weighed; Memories are information, not physical objects.
Intelligence and accumulation of memories would not appear to be correlated, so, no,
What color are electrons?
You haven’t yet explained how creation can be considered a theory when it does not adhere to the definition of what a theory is, so your turn hasn’t ended yet.
MrO, I think I would have wanted to ask your teachers to prove their position by choosing to believe in Vishnu for a week or two and then choose someone or no one else as a follow-up. It would have been pretty pointless as a demonstration, of course, because I can’t fathom such an experience and you can only see what someone’s outward behavior suggests, not what they really believe inside themselves.
lekatt, how about you choose to believe that your experience was a by-product of your brain chemistry instead of a reflection of an external reality? I, personally, don’t insist that’s what it was, but if you’re not “controlled” by some outside force, you could do that, couldn’t you? And change back if you wanted?
As has been pointed out, the conviction of any belief is an inner compulsion, not an outward one. I suppose you can call it a “choice,” since there isn’t any part of you that’s not assenting to the decision, but it doesn’t feel the same as choosing between chocolate truffle or strawberry cheesecake at Baskin-Robbins.
