That never made sense to me. I can’t explain why a just and loving god would have some people born bind or deaf but obviously some babies are. Why not then some folks unable to believe in god simply because of how they are wired?
Could you decide tomorrow to be an atheist?
I personally love olives, especially green ones.
But anyone can choose to believe in Christ. It’s something that’s up to each of us.
That seems to be a very superficial level of belief. So you could just dismiss everything you think you have figured out about the workings of the universe and just decide to be an atheist?
You’re basing that on what? ETA I was pissed and went too far. The original question remains.
Absolutely. I could re-look at the evidence, and re-consider things, and decide there is no God.
I was once an agnostic.
Just like that, in one day? Like flipping a switch?
Well, when I switched from agnostic to Christian, it was a gradual thing, and there were many things I examined socially and in the Bible, as well as some personal reflection on my life. We all have our own journey. I won’t go into all the details.
But I definitely had a choice in the matter.
I don’t know why you guys are getting so triggered by my statement about belief in God being a choice. It absolutely is a choice though.
Also what culture they are born into.
I’ve been reading a book called Japanese Death Poems which I highly recommend. It’s a collection of poems written before the deaths of numerous people, as is the custom, usually Zen monks and samurai. There is a lot of historical context provided including details about each poet when they are known.
The way these poems approach death is so different than how Americans typically do. It’s so different that I read it right before I nod off to sleep. It’s oddly comforting to just inhabit a different perspective on something that’s usually so scary.
Also just reading about the history of some religions throughout parts of Asia… Jesus just does not make sense in so many cultural contexts. I can’t see how anyone reasonable could fault like an 8th century Japanese farmer for not even considering Christianity.
I disagree. Can you provide something to back this up? Can you respond to the many thought experiments presented to you?
I provided my own experience. It’s patently ridiculous that I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I absolutely chose to believe in God.
Yeah… after thinking about it and deciding that it made sense to you. You didn’t just decide to do it for shits and giggles, right?
You made your process very clear,
and your process is not what people mean when they say you can’t choose your beliefs.
You didn’t choose you were convinced.
It’s not that simple. Belief in the supernatural (and its opposite) is a result of other choices, namely, the choice whether to think, to be guided by the best sort of reasoning you can do for yourself or absorb from someone else. Or you can choose to not think very carefully (or much at all), to adopt a mindset that makes you more comfortable than the one that derives from vigorous use of reason, and down this road lies, among other things, belief in the supernatural. Maybe belief is a kind of emotion – you can’t choose your emotions directly, but you can affect them by your conscious thinking processes. Interesting (to me), I hadn’t thought of that before.
Nope.
You can keep on saying that all you please; but that isn’t going to make it so.
Because you are telling us that you know the insides of our own minds better than we do. And you don’t.
And you are telling us that your experience counts, but ours doesn’t.
Why should we credit your experience, when you won’t credit ours?
And even if we do credit yours, why should you assume that everyone is exactly like you?
Once you turn on your brain, it’s pretty hard to turn it off. I didn’t really learn about empiricism until I read a casual book called Why People Believe Weird Things in 2007. It covered things like alien abduction and Holocaust denial, but the front of the book had a primer on the scientific method. That’s when I realized the therapy I was doing was bullshit, so that’s probably why I wasn’t feeling any better. I became very interested in solving my problems with the best available evidence and I never looked back. The only real drawback is you kind of become a party pooper.
On that note, I’m going to bed.
ETA: Oh, and I was only “triggered” insofar as I have actual PTSD, so that was kind of a low blow, but it’s Mother’s Day and things can come bubbling to the surface without warning on such days. Seventeen year old me is existentially threatened by the notion that my traumatic loss wasn’t real. 41 year old me doesn’t really care.
Not a big deal, probably, but I wonder if this is directed at me (since you seemed to be responding to my post at the beginning of your post), possibly in error? I’m not sure where the “triggered” reference came from, and I hope I was not responsible for any sort of low blow. All the best.
I mostly agree with you. I think it’s complicated. Faith can be a choice. After all, faith is belief without our even in spite of evidence. But a person has to have a strong motive to hold that faith. It takes a desire for it to be true, and it takes a wilful interpretation of events to support that faith. So in that, I think that is part of the factors that affect our ability to hold a faith.
I don’t think one can arbitrarily decide to believe something for a while. It does take the accumulation of experiences and knowledge that allow us to filter possible things to believe. But many people, when faced with point blank experience that contradicts their faith, find it difficult to retain a belief. That is experiential evidence that defies continued belief.
In that, I think you are correct that a person doesn’t choose to believe or not, they reach the conclusion based upon their experience. Logic and reasoning and looking for evidence are mostly after effects of a person trying to fit their worldview together.
Yeah. Quite a lot of what’s often thought of as reasoned is often rationalizing instead.
So you didn’t wake up one morning and decide you would like to be a Christian. What set you on the path to even considering it? What lead you to examine the Bible and social patterns with the possibility it could be true? How did you start the long journey?
At some point you did decide that you believed, but you worked your way to that decision. It was an accumulation of thoughts and experiences that lead you to that conclusion, not an arbitrary choice, right?