No, I don’t mean that someone else is making you believe something against your will.
My question is: can you decide to adopt religious belief, or is it something that just happens to you, that you don’t have any conscious control over, like liking or disliking a certain taste?
I started asking myself this question after some evangelicists cornered me and tried to convince me I should believe what’s in the bible. Even if, for the sake of argument, I concede that their points are valid on a rational level, I just don’t believe it.
You can force yourself to believe all kinds of crazy things. Haven’t you ever seen someone convince themselves of something just because it makes them feel better? Fake it until you make it. Or brain wash yourself. Be like Winston, God is your Big Brother.
You can trick yourself into believing a lot of things because it makes you happy, but on the whole I don’t think you can believe anything you don’t want to.
Anyone who tries to force their beliefs on you is fundamentally flawed on how to make an argument to try and have you believe the same thing they do. And that’s with religion, politics, sexuality, martians or whether The West Wing is the greatest tv show of all time.
We should all be smart enough to separate the person from the belief, but that would be critical thinking and not hip so…you know…that never happens
While one can definitely convince themselves of something, I always think of it this way, paraphrasing a quote somewhere: “Its interesting that the religion you belief in happens to coincide with your personal preferences”
Belief has both voluntary and involuntary aspects.
One voluntary aspect is that you can voluntarily choose to open-mindedly consider the arguments or evidence for something, and that can but will not necessarily lead to belief. If you’ve ever changed your beliefs about anything, there’s a good chance that there were certain things you chose to do (things you chose to read, people you chose to listen to, places you chose to go) that, if you had not so chosen, your belief would not have changed.
Another voluntary aspect is that you can choose to act as though you believed something to be true. And those actions can, in turn, engender/strengthen belief, in at least some cases.
Using NLP/Hypnosis, you can install any kind of belief quite quickly by finding out what a “true” belief looks/sounds/feels like and installing it in the same manner. Takes a few minutes.
You have control over your brain and its contents. When you encounter something new, you have the choice to accept it into your belief system or reject it. Usually the question is: Can you integrate it into your existing beliefs or is there some contradiction? The thing is, facts don’t just float around on their own; every fact, every idea, has a context. And if you accept something as true, you have to ask yourself how it relates to everything else you’ve accepted.
Agreement. It might take some work – I would say a lot more than a few minutes! – but, yes, if you absolutely had to believe something, you could make yourself do it.
I’m a little less certain about involuntary belief. I sometimes wonder about people who have had life-altering major religious revelations. Could that happen to me? Should I be worried that, sometime next week, I’ll be a religious believer and start witnessing everyone I know?
I have seen people succumb (if that is the correct word) to such massive shifts in belief. It doesn’t make any sense at all to me; it seems to have zero relevance to actual evidence, but to be wholly a subjective event. But to them, it’s a very significant event.
The argument that a particular belief is involuntary implies that a person born of Arabian parentage is genetically predisposed to believe in a Muslim orthodoxy, or one of Thai ancestry to be Buddhist.
a proposition for which there is no evidence.
However, it is true that any human being is predisposed to accepting certain doctrines on the basis of faith alone, a defect that can be exploited by faith-based persuasion.
That doesn’t follow at all. That’s extraordinarily bad logic.
Different religions are prevalent in different regions, due to various historical contingencies. It has nothing to do with individual predispositions.
You might as well argue that Mexicans are predisposed to eat Mexican cuisine. As individuals, no, they aren’t; as members of a culture and society, they are introduced to those cultural values and practices.
I guess the hard/important part is to figure out what areas are governed by belief and which ones by facts. However, I’m pretty sure many people claim the latter for areas that in reality are the former to them.
I agree that these kinds of spiritual events, although sometimes profoundly life-altering, are wholly subjective and can’t be perceived by or even more than vaguely described to anyone other than the person having them. People having these experiences often feel the need to respond by adopting some sort of religious belief or practice, but WHICH belief or practice they choose to adopt is based on a combination of the cultural milieu in which they live and their own personality structure. So, in one sense, people do choose what to believe, but in another sense, people sometimes experience an irresistible urge to believe in something which can’t be proved by objective evidence.
I think belief (religious or otherwise) has both a conscious (logical, decision-driven) and sub-conscious (emotional) components.
It isn’t quite as simple as saying “I want to believe x” because you can have a disconnect between your decision and your feelings about the decision. On the other hand, it’s not like you’re going to accidentally believe something against your will. You might change your feelings before or after making the conscious decision, but the decision still has to come at some point.
All the debate about Pluto’s planet-ness is probably a perfectly good non-religious example. It’s one thing to rationally say that new definitions of planet exclude Pluto, but most people (scientists included) have a sort of emotional investment in Pluto being a planet.
Choice is not a binary. Some things are in between voluntary and involuntary. It just looks like it is because most everyday examples fall cleanly on one side or the other, but that doesn’t mean everything does. For example, does someone with OCD choose to wash their hands a dozen times? I think belief is another such example. It’s sort of voluntary and sort of not.