(November 30, 2015 at 7:57 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(November 30, 2015 at 7:25 pm)Clueless Morgan Wrote: A "con" or "confidence trick" is when a person gains another's confidence in order to take advantage of or defraud the other person, so in that respect I agree with Cathy that one cannot "con" oneself.
What Simon is describing sounds more like self-deception.
Since you brought it up, what are your beliefs based on?
A large part of it is personal experience/evidence.
And by basing them on personal experience/evidence, you are ignoring the vast amount of constantly growing evidence on why those kinds of evidence, when it comes to existential claims, are often wrong, at best.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
