I read a thread on Reddit where a Christian was lecturing other Christians, “You can’t just pray to God to lose weight if you’re not also dieting and exercising hard. It doesn’t work like that. Why can’t more believers get this?”
And, I’m saying you can’t just choose to believe in something. You can choose to go down a path that may lead to you believing something, but belief is not a switch that you can choose to turn on or off.
Your evidence that people can choose to believe is something that we’d need to already believe in order for it to apply?
I have no idea why John said that. But I have no reason to think that it’s true; and I don’t believe it.
Plus which, there’s nothing in that quote which says that people get to choose. I can say quite accurately that people born unable to breathe will perish. Doesn’t prove that they had any choice in the matter.
It’s not an “on/off” switch. But it is a choice. You have some say in the matter. You’re not a pre-programmed robot.
He has to take it because otherwise the entire doctrine of Christianity will fall apart. If God is truly just, He cannot condemn people who have no choice in what they believe, ergo, other people’s experiences are irrelevant and wrong.
I can’t believe you’re quoting the Bible in a debate that is fundamentally about whether or not the Bible is accurate.
Your claim does not follow from your quote. Nothing there about belief being a choice. At any rate, John’s account of Jesus departs significantly from the other three Gospels, and is the latest written, nearly a hundred years after Jesus’ death, so he was probably not so much in the loop about what Jesus said or thought. He had his own agenda.
Here’s what Jesus said about who actually gets eternal life:
Matthew 25:46-31
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
Nothing there about choosing to believe anything.
Is that a choice that you don’t believe that I"m quoting the Bible in this debate? Or do you have no say in the matter when you don’t believe that I’m quoting the Bible?
I think you have choice in the matter.
I have no choice but to believe that you’re quoting the Bible, because I can clearly see that you’re quoting the Bible.
I can also see that you’re dodging the issue @Spice_Weasel (and I) pointed out by picking on a figure of speech. Can you directly answer this: do you understand that to people who do not believe the Bible is the word of god, quoting the Bible provides no evidence whatsoever?
I’m giving my views on the matter of choice. As a Christian, I’m going to occasionally quote the Bible. Whether you choose to agree with me or not is up to you. But you will be making a choice.
You are also choosing to dodge questions. Can you choose to believe that Garfield is God?
You haven’t answered my question.
I choose to point that out. But I’m not choosing to disagree with you. I’m only choosing to say something about it.
No, of course it’s not a choice whether I believe anything. That’s my whole point. I’m going to see things the way I see them, and being human, I’m probably going to seek out things that confirm what I already believe. The only thing that really shifts my belief is if I have a number of experiences or data points that contradict what I already believe to be true. Then I’m going to start questioning whether what I believe is true. Then, because I am who I am, I am going to start looking into things more deeply and gathering evidence (some people do not do this.) I get to decide what to do in response to doubt. But ultimately I don’t get to decide what I believe about what I find.
Very recently, however, the term “belief” has been described as to be used widespread in the cognitive science literature to explain human reasoning and behavior.[2] Specifically, it has been described that beliefs act as fundamental hypotheses about the world that result from any amount of cognitive processing and are held with any degree of certainty. Thus, beliefs are apparently not propositions expressed by consciously aware, so-called rational agents, but, on the contrary, determinants of people’s spontaneous and intuitive behavior in a complex world…
In cognitive neuroscience, beliefs are considered as brain products that result from neural processes… These processes imply that a person observes events in the external world, infers the causes of the events, and forms beliefs about them. In other words, belief formation results from the multisensory perception of external information within and across modalities in a probabilistic fashion, emotional valuation in terms of subjective effort/reward estimations, and encoding of this composite information in memory.
None of that sounds particularly voluntary to me.
My husband follows the r/ex-mormon subreddit (I’m not sure why, he’s an ex-Catholic) and there’s an expression there “breaking the shelf.” Everyone has this bookshelf. And when, in the course of your faith, you stumble upon something that doesn’t add up, a question that can’t be answered, a belief that doesn’t make sense, you put a book on your shelf. Everyone has a bookshelf of varying strength. For some people, it only takes a few books for the shelf to break. For some it holds up under enormous strain.
But for many people, yeah, their shelf just breaks.
We have been talking about the choice to believe or not believe in one or more peculiar entities called gods. Would it make any difference if we framed it as the choice to have faith or not have faith (in anything)?
Faith, in and of itself, is sometimes, by some people, deemed to be a value, almost irrespective of what that faith is. I can hear in my mind’s ear, for example, the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind, saying “We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!” He wasn’t talking about abandoning belief in God, which was probably much more unthinkable in those days and in that place. It seems like he was talking about the concept of faith itself, faith as opposed to science and reason. You can, I think, choose to abandon reason once you have known it, if only under great emotional stress, or choose not to.
I’m not sure if this adds anything to this discussion or not. Just spitballin’ here.
I’ll donate $1k to the charity of your choice if you choose to believe you can fly and demonstrate to me that you believe it.
I think you are contributing. I think sometimes faith can be based on reason. Faith in the scientific method would be an example. Faith in my husband after 22 years together. In both instances faith is earned, in a sense, from getting reliable results over a period of a long time. It every time I drop a pencil it falls to the ground, it makes sense to have faith that gravity will bring it to the ground every time - especially if I’ve educated myself about how gravity works.
The problem is blind faith, faith that won’t accept new information, faith that limits possibility rather than expanding it.
To use a small example, I realized at a certain point that the level of faith I had in my husband limited his freedom to be a flawed human being. Since having a child with him my beliefs about him have adjusted a bit, to be more in line with reality rather than this idealized view I had. He really is a wonderful father and husband and this is not to take away from that. But there can be something incredibly sobering about becoming new parents, and in a sense it was a reality check for me. It also made me realize how little credit I actually gave myself all those years. So I finally feel like we are equal partners in the sense that I no longer elevate him above myself.
I don’t know how much the average person changes but I have changed a lot in the course of my life, and that includes changes in worldview. Certainly I’ve been motivated toward worldviews that are life-affirming and working toward that end for a long time. But who knows where I’ll land in thirty more years. When I was nineteen I became an existentialist, chose to call myself a Buddhist because it already made perfect sense to me, but I would never have predicted I’d be coming back to it in a serious way twenty years later. But I’m still an existentialist more than anything else. It’s not about what I believe per se but what’s useful to me and others. So yes I will say I believe this thing, this makes sense to me, but I’m never married to it.
Maybe that’s one of the effects of losing your faith so abruptly. You just don’t feel anything after that is True in any objective sense.
Funny enough I have a tattoo of the Sanskrit word for “impermanence” I got when I was twenty. I kind of regret the tattoo but I’m amused it has new meaning now.
Do you run any other part of your life that way? For instance, no one understands why your car died, so God (or demons) must have done it? And what broke your car isn’t even on the other side of a singularity.
God of the gaps is a well understood logical fallacy. Surely you don’t want to believe something based on a fallacy!
I like that phrasing.
A person in my critique group was so fundamentalist she was a flat earther. She wrote in her book about how superbly moral Lot was. Someone else in the group, a non-fanatical Christian, beat me to it and said “have you actually read that story?”
Yeah, she believed in that limited Bible her preachers told her about. Someone said that the Bible has made more atheists than any other book.
My bookshelf was pretty flimsy, but then my family was never very religious. My grandfather was an atheist, though of course back then you never said so. My father sent me to Hebrew school only because those who went to the school got the good bar mitzvah slots, and he wanted to have a big party. My deconversion was quite painless.
I often hear the example of faith in a spouse, but I strongly expect that you, like me, have evidence for your husband’s fidelity. (Well, I have evidence of my wife’s fidelity, not your husband’s.) We don’t need faith in our spouses, not in the Biblical sense.
Now, someone with faith in a spouse who is as absent as God is likely heading for a rude awakening.
I’m not interested in ancient comic book heroes. I get enough out of modern ones.
I’m talking about firsthand witness of miracles. Secondhand is too far away, nevermind thirdhand, or whatever you call inconsistent stories written decades after they supposedly happened by anonymous sources, compiled by committees a couple centuries later, and translated multiple times by parties with political and religious axes to grind.
Why? And what makes that thing the God of the Bible, as interpreted and understood by your particular sect?
But saying “the Bang can’t bang itself” is unproven. It’s an unjustified assertion based upon a projection of causality encouraged by a language problem. We humans are used to a world of actions, i.e. events caused by actors, i.e. ourselves. We see the world through a lens of causality as a result of intent, and thus an intender.
This seems to be embedded in our nature by the way we come to awareness and learn how to interact in the world. This is a perceptual illusion. This we humans project actors that cause all events. Ergo, thunder gods, gods of rain, evil spirits that attack us and ruin our health, etc.
There is this idea that God is vast, beyond our ability to understand to fully express in words. Well, perhaps it is the cosmos that is too complex for our minds to truly grasp and put in words, especially words that feed intrinsic mental constructs like intentionism.
Your belief was a choice, made after extensive reading, evaluating, and reflection. So it was a choice that was informed by lots of various information bits that you interpreted and framed and crunched into a worldview you can accept. Then you chose to believe it.
People are saying that you didn’t just one day decide to be a Christian, and then go looking for evidence. Rather, you gathered experiences and interpretations that reinforced each other until it made a coherent enough whole you could believe it possible. Then you chose.
But others of us have had different experiences that prevent that concept you have of forming a coherent whole for us. It isn’t coherent enough for us to believe possible. So we can no more choose to believe it than we can choose to believe that humans can levitate.
Is not a free choice. It would take extensive reworking of our worldview to make the things we see as inconsistencies add up.
It would take incredible motivation to seek ways to reinterpret the experiences that we have had into something compatible with your worldview. People don’t make that kind of effort willy nilly.
That’s what we mean by it’s not a choice. It’s not a simple, “Ok, today I’ll believe in unicorns.” The idea is too inconsistent with our worldview for it to fit, to feel real. It’s not a possibility that can work.
Your “choice” was in a numerous, likely uncountable and nonconscious number of little decisions that accumulated into a worldview that allowed your God to be an acceptable fit.
Not really. Faith is a belief method that still has an underpinning of some experiential evidence. We have to have a basis for seeing that object of faith as a possibility, even a remote one.
Faith as a worldview is interesting. Beliefs are formed in various ways. There is the evidential belief of knowledge, or belief by reasoning. And then there is belief by choice that ostensibly does not rely on evidence, but in faith, or desire for it to be true.
Except our emotional decisions may not be based on concrete logic and evidence, but there is still an underpinning of some sort of accumulation of experiences that work as a subconscious justification. Our internal mental construct of the world and how it works is ultimately what every one of us is using to decide if we can believe or have faith.
Some of those experiences are how our culture and even language shape our conceptions. Some of it is unexamined information absorbed by trusted authority figures, like our parents, teachers, society.
Some of us have radical mystical experiences - causes unclear. Maybe hallucingen-induced, maybe sensory overload, dehydration etc. Maybe supernatural beings - not likely in my worldview, but I include it for completeness.
The total of those experiences let us construct a subconscious worldview that sets the boundaries on what we can believe is possible. Faith works within those boundaries.
Faith also depends upon motives. The more substantial the variation to our worldview, the more motivation we require to seek transformative experiences to rebuild those boundaries.
I can’t choose to believe in God or gods. I have no motivation to pursue experiences that might open me up to the possibility I could believe. At one time I was a believer, but a large part of that was a non-fully formed worldview from childhood. As I encountered the world, my experiences made that belief untenable. I had to give it up. It didn’t fit with how ai perceive the universe
It’s not what I mean; at least, not as I read that. The way you’ve phrased it makes it seem as if anyone who was determined enough to do so could in fact choose to believe in the Christian god. No amount of determination could make me reinterpret my experiences and my knowledge into that, any more than any amount of determination could make me believe that I’m actually seven years old or seven feet tall.
What if there was a massive and well established support group dedicated to that idea-would that make it easier?