Is belief in God a choice

[Kyuuketsuki]

I did not choose that stance nor could I choose to believe again. I could no more choose to believe in a god than I could switch my ability to think off.

How could anyone say that ...and then also say they had an open mind? I don't understand it. That's just an incredibly prejudicial POV.

Contrary to popular opinion, being open-minded is not about treating every silly point of view as if it were the equal of a stance based on reason nor is it about believing everything one hears nor even about giving every fantasy world someone claims to have experienced the same credibility as reality.

In fact being open-minded is about:

• Establishing exactly what claim is being made, what phenomenon is being tested or evaluated.
  
• Establishing all possible explanations to account for the phenomenon and, if possible ...
  
• Setting up and executing a series of strictly controlled tests or observations designed to systematically and rationally eliminate the wrong possibilities and establish which accounts for the phenomenon in question.

To quote Spock ("Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country"), "An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Open-mindedness requires a reasoned and rational approach, if possible it requires observation, evidence, hypothesis, verification, tentativeness, falsifiability & it requires logic ... in short, true open-mindedness requires science or at least a similar rational approach. Furthermore open-mindedness is fairly evidently necessary to investigate the universe & world in which we exist.

I have often been accused of not being open-minded indeed some have accused me of being a fundamentalist atheist because they imply I am "unwilling to expand my borders" when in fact what they dislike is that I am not able to suspend my objectivity enough to accept a pile of foetid dingo's kidneys as a valid hypothesis. However those people are wrong ... science is open-minded, science is empirical, I am an adherent of science and an atheist because of it and I try my very best to be open minded like science.

However, that someone's mind is open, does not give anyone else the right to pour their crap into it! Nor does it give others the unchallengeable prerogative to claim someone is not "open-minded" because they are not prepared to tolerate fantasy views touted as fact nor even their views based on logic or reason (unless they really are) ... I would argue that such rational individuals, like science, are open-minded in the most objective sense!

As Dawkin's said, "There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out!"

I may well end up believing in your god or some other but what it won't be is a choice! If you want to let your brains to fall out then be my guest!

My observation is that the commonly held view that theists are somehow less rational [as a group] than atheists,is a fiction invented by insecure atheists. I've seen no evidence to support such a view.

I don't agree because to my mind a belief in a god is a step away from reason so whilst everything else may be working tickety boo there's something gone wrong somewhere ... it's also my view that there is a positive correlation between education and atheism. Several have claimed there is data supporting that but, despite asking, I've never seen any ... nevertheless, based on personal experience I believe that is true though in the absence of hard evidence that's all it is, a view.

But ultimately, as Shermer says, smart people defend stupid ideas cleverly.

Kyu