RE: Is belief really a choice?
April 5, 2013 at 9:22 am
(This post was last modified: April 5, 2013 at 9:26 am by Mystic.)
(April 5, 2013 at 8:52 am)KichigaiNeko Wrote: Agreed. I can chose to "believe" in Dragons.
Thing is ..... I am aware of the fact that I chose to "believe" and know full well that my belief is a lie I tell myself.
Religious people have not come this far.
But if you decided all of sudden to abandon skeptic type thinking and became open to all sorts of ideas out there, there are people who do believe "dragons" in a different dimension, exist, and are more or less "spiritual dragons" you can communicate with and they can guide you, and they write books about it, and book stores sell those books...so while you trust yourself not to, it's not rationally impossible for you to chose to believe in dragons.
I said earlier there was agnostic atheist on shiachat, that I could've sworn, would never come to Islam, but he did.
I was at one point pretty certain I would never leave Islam, it was unthinkable.
The point is people leave irrational thoughts to rational thoughts and rational thoughts to irrational all the time.
In that process, there can very well be with will power influencing what direction you take.
If we has some choice in that that direction, we do then have some choice in our beliefs, even though it would not be in a vacuum, but with factors influencing us.
And even though it's not a instant decision but a developed struggled type one.
In the case of dragons, a step would be, "Am I interested enough to see what these dragon believers have to say?" but then on the other hand, you can say "I'm not wasting my time on such nonsense". And I do believe the latter is the more rational decision.
No one can prove dragons exist on a different dimension and can guide us, so I wouldn't bother myself now, although, there was a point in my life where I was interested in what they had to say.
