William writes: "For some reason Cheerskep ignores my main point that belief is not a choice but a necessity of consciousness."
I'm sorry I gave you the impression I was ignoring the main point in your last message, William. I was trying to restrain a bad habit of mine - putting too many points in one message - and I compelled myself to address your multiplex message in several parts. The fact that my first response confined itself to your first sentence - " Why is Cheerskep still angry over his early disillusionment with religion." - was not meant to convey I was ignoring the rest. As it happens, I feel I did address your line above. My different wording may have failed to convey that I agree with much of what your line seems to be saying. In particular, I feel I echoed your phrase "belief is not a choice but a necessity" when I said I rejected the advice of Pascal's Wager because it "implied that belief is subject to an act of will, and I've never found that so for me." I also apologize ahead of time if I am misinterpreting your next line when you say, "This aspect of belief has nothing to do with the existence of a god or gods or anything at all concerned with religious belief." What you had in mind with the phrase, "This aspect of belief. . ." is probably escaping me, because I can't agree with the rest of that sentence: I feel the belief in the existence of a god is precisely the sort of thing that Pascal was urging, and the sort of belief I cannot, by an act of will, make obtain in my mind. Your next phrase is intriguing: "But it does imply that Cheerskep's denial of belief. . ." I hope I nowhere said I deny belief. I have lots of what I think most people would call "beliefs". Or, if by that line you mean that I can choose the beliefs I want to embrace, and voluntarily send others away from my mind's door, I'd say I personally do neither. Believing or disbelieving is not for me voluntary. If, say, a "proposition" contains two mutually contradictory clauses, no act of will can make me embrace those two clauses at the same time. And certainly my mind is unable to deny many unhappy beliefs that I wish were otherwise. In this I can't speak for others. I do not mean to ignore the rest of your email if I stop this note here. It's only 400 words, but I sense that any more would make it more unreadable that it probably already is to some listers.
