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[Serious] Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
#11
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
Serious
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#12
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 3, 2021 at 10:05 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:



To what extent do the expressed beliefs of others alter our opinions of them and why should that be the case?



I just want to start with this one.  When first meeting a new neighbor some 20 odd years ago I did an inner eye roll.  She came to my door with two small boys and a babe in arms.  She pushed the boys to approach me with a fundraiser for their church kids club.  She wanted them to do it themselves.  Then she used the moment to introduce herself and said she was getting nothing out of taking the boys around except for the hope of earning a jewel in her crown in heaven.  My initial thought was "Oh no, here we go."  But since people judged me in that little southern town for being raised Catholic I intended to keep an open mind thinking that our encounters would probably be minimal anyway and it doesn't hurt to be polite to your neighbors.  And she was cheerleader perky with big hair and a lovely smile to go with her drawl.

Fast forward...along the way she had two more boys and my son was like a big brother to them...teaching them to throw a football and play baseball and shoot baskets. And since I worked outside the home, she was my son's other mother when needed.  She and I were both raised Catholic...she became Pentacostal and I, atheist.  We talked quite a lot about what we did and didn't believe.  Our birthdays were less than a week apart in June (though a decade apart in years).  Though we are miles apart, we are still in contact and she is one of my favorite people.  My son is still in touch with her boys.  Her faith just is.  It doesn't feel forced or put on for show.  She is genuine and she is also real.  With a drug addicted mother and son and an alcoholic father, she isn't unaware of the dark side of life.  It's not all rainbows and butterflies.  And her faith has been tested.

She is funny, can be irreverent, has an occassional drink and a cigarette and no one has to censor themselves around her and she doesn't always have her filter on either.  The best thing is that while her faith is important to her and she wants her family to share in it, she does not feel it's her job to change other people.  She says that the god she believes in will reveal himself to people in his own time.  She just lives her beliefs.

What's important is how you treat people.  We all have differences in a variety of things.  That makes things interesting.
  
“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” — Confucius
                                      
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#13
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 3, 2021 at 1:56 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: To answer your question, I would say that to the extent that the expressed beliefs of others allow us to categorize them as belonging to a group different from ours, it will automatically and insidiously alter our opinions of them. And there are a number of ways in which these biases begin to emerge: Ingroup favoritism, ingroup overexclusion, outgroup homogeneity effects, the list goes on.

I think this is a key factor in discussions of belief. In so many cases, a belief is not an isolated assent to a proposition, but one aspect of group identity. Then the fact that one is a member of the group affects one's thinking in other ways. This is true for religious people and atheists as well. A person might feel drawn to one or more characteristics of a group, and then once he's joined let the group fill in all the rest of his beliefs.

So it becomes a package deal. You start with the idea that we need some kind of ultimate justice in the world, so you join a church and end up subscribing to a detailed theological system. 

Or you have a general dislike of religion and its effects, so you begin to identify as an atheist and end up repeating the slogans you hear. 

Probably people who identify with a group are also likely to feel entitled to claim for themselves the characteristics they see the group as having. So for example a very bad person might think that Christians are the group of good people, and since he's a Christian he's allowed to think of himself as good. Even though he's bad. 

Likewise someone who can't think well and is ignorant of history might think of atheists as the group who reasons well and knows history. So by identifying as an atheist he can feel smarter than others, even though he's dumb.
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#14
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 3, 2021 at 10:05 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Beliefs seem more like accidental than essential features of a person.

This is certainly true in the Aristotelian sense. A person's beliefs can change entirely, and he'll still be a person -- so beliefs are accident. 

That said, I think that each of us has a system or web of beliefs that runs very deep. To what extent this is learned and what extent it is innate is debatable, I suppose. And how deeply it can change is an open question. There may be beliefs (things you hold to be true about the world, or fundamental interpretations about reality) which in fact are innate characteristics of human beings. And here I'm not talking politics or religion, but basic stuff like quantity, unity, and plurality. Things we hold to be true about the world which -- who knows? -- aliens might not hold. 

I suspect that there is something like an "episteme" (if you don't mind using Foucault's word) for any given time and place. This sets the limits of what we are able to believe. Deviation from this will be called crazy. Yet the boundaries change over time. Atheists and Christians in a given society share most of this framework, and much of the fight is the "narcissism of small differences."

Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be a person completely unlike myself. Say, someone in pre-technological India who takes for granted some precursor of what came to be Hinduism. It's hard to imagine. If I became like that I would no longer be myself, in any meaningful sense.

(June 3, 2021 at 10:05 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Are beliefs a consequence of personal values or are values a consequence of beliefs?

(Forgive me if you've heard this one...)

In English, the word "believe" has two meanings:

#1 Assent to a proposition. e.g. "I believe in Santa Claus," or "I believe the earth is round."

#2 Commitment to a principle. e.g. "I believe in equal rights for women." 

In fact, neither Santa Claus nor equal rights for women (currently) exist. Yet example #1 about a nonexistent thing is foolish, while example #2 about a nonexistent thing is admirable. 

So in many cases, beliefs just ARE personal values. 

In practice, I think the two types of belief get blended. So for example, someone might feel strongly about the values given in the Sermon on the Mount. In committing to these principles (type #2), this person will take on board associated notions about Jesus -- that he is divine, that he is the way to heaven, etc. (type #1). I remember meeting a serious Christian who devoted her life to anti-war causes. I asked her if the world was created in six days, and she said she'd never thought about it, but she guessed it must be so. She was a type #2 Christian, and I (rudely) cornered her into a type #1 assent. 

In thinking adults, atheism is a type #1 belief, namely, "I believe that there is no persuasive evidence for the existence of God." It also can shift into a value-type belief. E.g. "I believe in a world without religion."
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#15
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 3, 2021 at 8:08 pm)Belacqua Wrote: In fact, neither Santa Claus nor equal rights for women (currently) exist. Y

Wow. You equated equal rights for women with Santa as mythical.

As a red blooded male and frequent tripod, I can only say that is abject mysogyny. All women are my equal and often my better.

You reduce women to objects.

That is creepy.
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#16
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
I found a nice paragraph about how many modern atheists reproduce Christian thinking without realizing it. This is from a biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, student of Freud):

Quote:The best religions, she pursued, have simply enabled men to face life and love life, so that to transcend religion is to fulfill it by embracing "the naked truth," a god more jealous than even its Semitic forebear in that "it blesses only those who come to it at the price of being damned by it" -- and she wound up quoting a Catholic poetess against the saints' intercession: "For rather Thou shouldst damn me / Than another save me."

The idea is that when atheists give up belief in a saving god, because they prefer to be devoted to a cruel but undeniable truth -- called "truth" -- they are taking the values of Christianity a simple step further. For them, there is a transcendent truth about the world, perhaps unknowable but undeniable, and to turn away from this is not only mistaken but morally wrong. There is one and only one way to know it (science), and if we turn to other methods (e.g. revelation) we are committing a modern blasphemy to the one true way. And they'd rather face this depressing truth than be cheered up by a falsehood.

Of course Nietzsche described this, and said that complete atheism -- atheism taken to its logical end -- would also deny all of it. He said there is no truth, it's made up just like God is, and until we face this we are not free of religion.

This is an example of how structures of belief work, I think. Even if you don't quite agree with the Nietzscheans. The structure of the belief remains even when the particulars change, and it's very hard to imagine people who hold to a different structure.
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#17
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
The above responses prompted me to wonder when an epistemic failure is also immoral specifically for religious beliefs. AF culture tend to view any theist’s epistemic failure as more than just an innocent mistake but as the kind of cognitive error indicative of the theist’s moral or intellectual deficiency. Fortunately, I don’t feel that vibe nearly so much on serious threads. :-)

Let’s say a new Christian member to AF starts promoting YEC, to use vulcan’s example. My bias as a Christian could be in favor of considering his belief an innocent intellectual error but not a moral one, i.e. the new member had no moral duty to hold any particular opinion about evolution. I would bet that most AF members would have a bias in the other direction; it is a moral failure to not see that YEC is nonsense that even other Christians recognize as a bunch of scientific sounding rationalizations used to maintain an impoverished hermeneutic ,<takes deep breath>.  When I read the personal experiences of earlier posts, I hear stories of truly stand-up people that hold truly fringe opinions, like a harmless YEC-believing friend or a neighbor who harbors a pet conspiracy theory. But I myself would feel much differently about a high-school biology professor teaching YEC or a CRT-promoting mayor (And yes, I think CRT is as epistemologically flawed as YEC, if not worse.) I guess what I am saying is it seems that epistemic failures, when the practical application of a belief is of consequence, suggest a logically prior moral failure to perform the intellectual due diligence required to establish whether a belief has sufficient warrant for relying on it in the first place.  

At the same time I want to oppose my own rush to judgement because I am truly sick and tired of moral scolds on every side telling everyone else how every minor activity of life apparently has important, wide-ranging moral consequences that demand tribal commitment. I don’t care if you’re a Republican/Tory or a Democrat/Labour – fifty percent of the population cannot be 100% wrong.  Why is it so difficult to see the beliefs of intellectual rivals as horribly mistaken, but not evil. On a more personal level, I suspect this wide-spread contemptuous attitude towards epistemic failures has infected many of my private conversations. People more frequently say things like…

What did you think was going to happen?
And you didn’t think to ask?
What kind of person thinks like that?
How could they not know better?


So while I generally believe every capable human being has a moral responsibility to think clearly and critically about actionable things to the degree those things matter, I also want to resist any kind of intellectual scrupulosity that add unnecessary animosity to the world.
<insert profound quote here>
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#18
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 5, 2021 at 4:29 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: The above responses prompted me to wonder when an epistemic failure is also immoral

I suspect this is another case of atheists reproducing Christian patterns. 

As I understand it, pagan religions didn't emphasize belief as much as they did practice. Nobody quizzed you on whether you truly held that Aphrodite truly existed, as long as you went to the temple on the right day and did the ceremony. 

In Plato's dialogues, for example, they speak as if the gods are real but are perfectly happy to say "heretical" things about them. For example, that there are really two Aphrodites, or that Eros is not a god but a spirit, etc. Belief in the gods was held lightly. But Socrates' last words were "We owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don't forget.” The ritual was important even to the guy who provided the theoretical underpinnings of all future monotheism. 

It's Christianity (particularly Luther?) which makes false belief a thought-crime. And this gets continued among atheists today. 

In addition to the accusations of immorality, people with false beliefs (from the perspective of the person doing the scolding) are also frequently accused of dishonesty. This forum's new member, johndoe, has been called dishonest over and over when people disagree with him, though he seems as sincere as he can be. 

I suspect that this comes from the extreme narrowness of his accusers' beliefs. Their own beliefs seem not only self-evident, but so indisputably absolutely true that they can't conceive of people honestly holding different ones. And if it's impossible to hold a different belief, then saying you do must be a lie. 

The inability to comprehend why sincere and good people might disagree with you is an unfortunate intellectual weakness.
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#19
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 5, 2021 at 7:51 pm)Belacqua Wrote: The inability to comprehend why sincere and good people might disagree with you is an unfortunate intellectual weakness.

I've always been under the impression that if I had all the facts in my brain that another person does, connected in the same way they do, that I too would arrive at the same or similar conclusion as they have. The value of conversation, therefore, lies in uncovering what it is someone knows and how it's connected to better understand what they're concluding.

I think we underestimate how much sense wrong ideas can make. They can be coherent, logical, and internally valid irrespective of being false. And perhaps they are moreso than right ideas.
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#20
RE: Questions about Belief and Personal Identity
(June 5, 2021 at 8:03 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I've always been under the impression that if I had all the facts in my brain that another person does, connected in the same way they do, that I too would arrive at the same or similar conclusion as they have. The value of conversation, therefore, lies in uncovering what it is someone knows and how it's connected to better understand what they're concluding.

Wait... You mean "good faith dialogue aimed at increased mutual understanding"? I remember that. Whatever happened to that, I wonder.

Quote:I think we underestimate how much sense wrong ideas can make. They can be coherent, logical, and internally valid irrespective of being false. And perhaps they are moreso than right ideas.

Yes, I think so too. 

Especially when the correct explanation for something is complex, or beyond the scope of what we've thought before. Then a wrong idea serves more comfortably. 

Even something like Q-anon, which seems downright insane to people who aren't into it, has an internal logic. It fits extremely well with lots of truths, half-truths, and concepts which are important for people's self-image. Probably it was tailor-made to do so. 

A lot of these lies that won't die, like the idea that there was a 1000-year Dark Age caused by Christianity, are just too satisfying to go away.
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