Choosing to believe

[Fromper]

Again, inertia + ignorance. In what you mentioned here, this is deliberate, willful ignorance: you are choosing to read the things you already agree with, so as to help convince yourself that the believe you already hold is correct. If you don't give yourself an option, they you cannot, logically, 'choose' anything.

In a very real sense (sorry, folks) a good number of non-believers are just as guilty of this sort of behaviour. How many times have you run across an atheists who proudly proclaims his/her ignorance of the Bible, or of any other scriptures? People like this haven't made the choice to be an atheist, they are prevent themselves for having to make a choice in the first place.

Are you saying that all atheists should study the Bible? Should they also study the holy books of all the other major religions in the world? What about the minor ones? Who decides which religions' books are major enough to study? How many different religions' holy books did you study in depth before deciding to become an atheist?

[Tonus]

On of prof Dawkins statements, under Pascals Wager, was that one can't simply decide to believe in something. I wonder if that's true.

It's possible that we can convince ourselves of things that aren't true, I think that is how phobias and other psychological blocks work. Our subconscious can accept pretty much anything as true, and can affect how we approach the real world.

I'm not sure if that means that a person can "choose to believe" something, though. I can't just say to myself "I believe that this is so" and have it happen, but with enough repetition and a heavy dose of confirmation bias I may well become convinced that it is.

[Angrboda]

There's an interesting set of experiments involving making "superstitious pigeons." If you condition pigeons by providing food after a stimulus, a sound or light, the pigeons will learn to expect food coming from the slot. However, if you just randomly supply the food, the pigeons will have a tendency to associate the delivery of food with whatever random behavior they happened to be doing, from hopping around to standing on one leg.

If we apply this idea of superstition to humans, it's clear you've introduced a source of anxiety into the organism, the anxiety over whether the individual is doing what needs to be done to get the reward. If the source of the anxiety can't be efficiently addressed, would this also not lead to irrational mechanisms for dealing with the anxiety in humans? I think it's logical. If someone is "superstitious" in this way, the drive to reduce internal anxiety could lead them to adopt all sorts of irrational beliefs, independent of any actual reasons for adopting those beliefs and behaviors.