Ernie: Below are two short articles about belief that are useful. There is a whole literature about
belief, however. See the Wikipedia article "Belief" to get the idea; it is a theme that can be looked at in, say, 20 different ways. Personally I think -in this case- simple is better. Simple is not always better, of course. If you want to fathom something of neuro-science, forget all about simple. Same for biology or marketing or you-name-it. But who can possibly enroll in a college curse every time you need to make a decision in life? Anyway, I'm a certified existentialist. Such issues don't slow me down. That is, it pays to be pragmatic about reality. True belief is what works, false belief is what does not work. How do I know whether something is true or false? Simple: Does my belief make my life better or worse? Hence, for all the interest these beliefs once had for me, by the wayside has gone a constellation of ideas that can be identified as "pietism," has gone purist Baha'i theology, has gone the idealistic scientism of Aurobindo, has gone Buddhist theory of meditation, has gone veneration of American Indian nature-ism, and so forth. Each has had its fascinations and I have learned from each,' but in every case there has been a fatal flaw. Or several flaws. For example, thanks to the Baha'i Faith it became possible to learn all kinds of things about the religions of the world, and from that to develop a curiosity about the cultures of the world. From which my life has benefited enormously. But is it true that all religions teach one truth? Nice belief but it happens to be false -even if as they say, there is some truth to the idea for a cluster or religions although not all religions. But for a true believer Baha'i you can't make such distinctions. I finally got to the point where I said to myself: To hell with that, unless I make these distinctions I will forever misconstrue the facts of history. And no thank you, I demand of myself, the objective truth about cultures and religions and everything else any historian must learn in order to teach the subject honestly to others. Hence, of course, my flat-out rejection of so-called 'liberal Christianity' since its premises are little different than Baha'is premises even if, in some cases, the liberal Christian source may actually be Theosophy or fashionable literary criticism or the worldview of the NY Times. Something similar for pietism, a word that I use in a generalized sense to mean "extreme devotionalism" rather than an encyclopedia definition that refers to a development in Lutheranism in the 17th century that came to influence the Wesleys and Methodism and ultimately the entire "holiness" movement in Christianity. Do I really benefit from praying at length? How does that make any sense? God already knows my thoughts. Does God demand that anyone should pray more than some minimum amount of time? Why would he make that kind of dubious demand? This is only the beginning, of course. Intense and sustained devotion to Jesus? What on earth for? What good does that do? And for sure it wastes a lot of time. Never forget Jesus, of course, always remember Christ's witness and, as much as possible, live for that witness. But that's the point, live for it in the real world not in some sort of escapist "prayer life," I have now read a whole range of testimonials from Pentecostals about their experiences and the story is pretty much the same for all the ex-Pentecostals namely, a huge hangover. Marathon devotions followed by a sinking feeling that it has all been a waste of time with little if anything to show for it. Plus the great disadvantage of trying to live a perfect life based on one sacrifice after another, chasing an impossible dream. Forgiveness, seems to me, must include forgiveness of myself for inability to live up to my highest ideals because, well, the fact is that I an human and imperfect. Pietism demands the kind of perfection that is, by definition, forever out of reach, therefore it is useless and, as well, incurs costs with no benefits. I mean, what is it all about anyway but self-absorption taken to an extreme? And, as far as 99.99999 % of other people are concerned, it makes one look like a fanatic for a very dubious cause. Why would anyone want that in his life? Not that I ever took pietism as far as many Pentecostals take it, but at one time, years ago, I took if far enough. Ooops, bad mistake. It cost me a few months let is say, but it was a lesson learned. What is heart rending are stories from Pentecostals, sometimes Charismatics, that speak of years or decades of this sort of thing, and for what? Nothing. Walter Kaufmann also demolished Pascal's Wager. What assurance does anyone have that its basic premise is true? None at all. Maybe the Buddhists have it right , or the Taoists, or who knows? Or maybe the Christians have it right but not in the way the wager is formulated. So you make a 10,000 sacrifices and then what? To re-interpret Kaufmann, suppose you are wrong and it is Luther who greets you at the pearly gates. What would he want to know from you? How much you sacrificed or how much you did with your life, for Christ, and, BTW, life for a Christian is supposed to be joyous through freedom in Christ. You are supposed to have a good time as well, for refreshing the soul, even if this should not mean doing anything evil. You tell him that you sacrificed a million things and he tells you that you were crazy to throw away the one life you had on earth, that you were supposed to make the most of. Ooops. How I look at things anyway. B. -------------------------------------------------------------- Psychology Today Alex Lickerman M.D. Happiness in this World<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-in-world> The Two Kinds Of Belief Why infants reason better than adults Posted Apr 24, 2011 WHAT IS BELIEF? Simply, a belief<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/spirituality> defines an idea or principle which we judge to be true. When we stop to think about it, functionally this is no small thing: lives are routinely sacrificed and saved based simply on what people believe. Yet I routinely encounter people who believe things that remain not just unproven, but which have been definitively shown to be false. In fact, I so commonly hear people profess complete certainty in the truth of ideas with insufficient evidence to support them that the alarm it used to trigger in me no longer goes off. I'll challenge a false belief when, in my judgment, it poses a risk to a patient's life or limb, but I let far more unjustified beliefs pass me by than I stop to confront. If I didn't, I wouldn't have time to talk about anything else. What exactly is going on here? Why are we all (myself included) so apparently predisposed to believe false propositions? The answer lies in neuropsychology's growing recognition of just how irrational our rational thinking can be, according to an article<http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney> in Mother Jones by Chris Mooney. We now know that our intellectual value judgments—that is, the degree to which we believe or disbelieve an idea—are powerfully influenced by our brains' proclivity for attachment<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attachment>. Our brains are attachment machines, attaching not just to people and places, but to ideas. And not just in a coldly rational manner. Our brains become intimately emotionally entangled with ideas we come to believe are true (however we came to that conclusion) and emotionally allergic to ideas we believe to be false. This emotional dimension to our rational judgment explains a gamut of measurable biases that show just how unlike computers our minds are: article continues after advertisement 1. Confirmation bias<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/motivated-reasoning>, which causes us to pay more attention<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attention> and assign greater credence to ideas that support our current beliefs. That is, we cherry pick the evidence that supports a contention we already believe and ignore evidence that argues against it. 2. Disconfirmation bias<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/bias>, which causes us to expend disproportionate energy trying to disprove ideas that contradict our current beliefs. Accuracy of belief isn't our only cognitive<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/cognition> goal. Our other goal is to validate our pre-existing beliefs, beliefs that we've been building block by block into a cohesive whole our entire lives. In the fight to accomplish the latter, confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias represent two of the most powerful weapons at our disposal, but simultaneously compromise our ability to judge ideas on their merits and the evidence for or against them. EVIDENCE VS. EMOTION Which isn't to say we can't become aware of our cognitive biases and guard against them—just that it's hard work. But if we really do want to believe only what's actually true, it's necessary work. In fact, I would argue that if we want to minimize the impact of confirmation and disconfirmation bias, we need to reason more like infants than adults. Though many people think belief can occur only in self-aware species possessing higher intelligence<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intelligence>, I would argue that both infants and animals also believe things, the only difference being they're not aware they believe them. That is, they do indeed judge certain ideas "true"—if not with self-aware minds, with minds that act based on the truth of them nonetheless. Infants will learn that objects don't cease to exist when placed behind a curtain around 8 to 12 months, a belief called object permanence<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence>, which scientists are able to determine from the surprise infants of this age exhibit when the curtain is lifted and the object has been removed. Animals will run from predators because they know—that is, believe—they will be eaten if they don't. In this sense, even protozoa can be said to believe things (e.g., they will move toward energy sources rather than away because they know, or "believe," engulfing such sources will continue their existence). article continues after advertisement Infants and animals, however, are free of the emotional biases that color the reasoning of adults because they haven't yet developed (or won't, in the case of animals) the meta-cognitive abilities of adults, i.e., the ability to look back on their conclusions and form opinions about them. Infants and animals are therefore forced into drawing conclusions I consider compulsory beliefs—"compulsory" because such beliefs are based on principles of reason and evidence that neither infants nor animals are actually free to disbelieve. This leads to the rather ironic conclusion that infants and animals are actually better at reasoning from evidence than adults. Not that adults are, by any means, able to avoid forming compulsory beliefs when incontrovertible evidence presents itself (e.g., if a rock is dropped, it will fall), but adults are so mired in their own meta-cognitions that few facts absorbed by their minds can escape being attached to a legion of biases, often creating what I consider rationalized beliefs—"rationalized" because adult judgments about whether an idea is true are so often powerfully influenced by what he or she wants to be true. This is why, for example, creationists continue to disbelieve in evolution despite overwhelming evidence in support of it and activist actors and actresses with autistic children continue to believe that immunizations cause autism<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/autism> despite overwhelming evidence against it. But if we look down upon people who seem blind to evidence that we ourselves find compelling, imagining ourselves to be paragons of reason and immune to believing erroneous conclusions as a result of the influence of our own pre-existing beliefs, more likely than not we're only deceiving ourselves about the strength of our objectivity. Certainly, some of us are better at managing our biases than others, but all of us have biases with which we must contend. article continues after advertisement What then can be done to mitigate their impact? First, we have to be honest with ourselves in recognizing just how biased we are. If we only suspect that what we want to be true is having an influence on what we believe is true, we're coming late to the party. Second, we have to identify the specific biases we've accumulated with merciless precision. And third, we have to practice noticing how (not when) those specific biases are exerting influence over the judgments we make about new facts. If we fail to practice these three steps, we're doomed to reason, as Jonathan Haidt argues, often more like lawyers than scientists—that is, backward from our predetermined conclusions rather than forward from evidence. Some evidence<http://www.scribd.com/doc/3446682/The-Second-National-Risk-and-Culture-Study-Making-Sense-of-and-Making-Progress-In-The-American-Culture-War-of-Fact> suggests we're less apt to become automatically dismissive of new ideas that contradict our current beliefs if those ideas are presented in a non-worldview-threatening manner or by someone who we perceive thinks as we do. Knowing, for example, that my patient was more predisposed to consider ideas if they came from me, his doctor (whom he trusted had his best interests at heart), I felt obligated to wield that power for the good, to challenge any ideas that had the potential to cause him more harm than good. (Though an argument could be made that I shouldn't have challenged his misguided belief in the power of vitamins to treat colon cancer, when he stopped taking them, his nausea did indeed resolve.) Despite my reluctance to challenge beliefs that people hold more strongly than evidence justifies, the inconvenient truth is that what one of us believes has immense power to affect us all (think of the incalculable harm the smallest fraction of us have caused because they believe if they die in the act of killing infidels, they'll be surrounded by virgins in the afterlife). As a society, therefore, we have critically important reasons to reject bad (untrue) ideas and promulgate good (true) ones. When we speak out, however, we must realize that reason alone will rarely if ever be sufficient to correct misconceptions. If we truly care to promote belief in what's true, we need to first find a way to circumvent the emotional biases in ourselves that prevent us from recognizing the truth when we see it. ========================================= Sources of Insight blog Where Do Beliefs Come From? By JD Meier <http://sourcesofinsight.com/author/JD/> 15<http://sourcesofinsight.com/where-do-beliefs-come-from/#comments> 18597 <https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsourcesofinsight.com%2Fwhere-do-beliefs-come-from%2F><https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Where+Do+Beliefs+Come+From%3F&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsourcesofinsight.com%2Fwhere-do-beliefs-come-from%2F&via=Sources+of+Insight><https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://sourcesofinsight.com/where-do-beliefs-come-from/><https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http://sourcesofinsight.com/where-do-beliefs-come-from/&media=&description=Where+Do+Beliefs+Come+From%3F> “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” — Stuart Chase Where do your beliefs come from? Maybe some come from advertisers. Maybe some come from authority figures. Maybe some are from your parents. Maybe some are from your own personal experience. But what’s the pattern behind the pattern for how you believe what you believe? Know They Beliefs I think if you know where beliefs come from and you understand the base, then you can better understand your own biases. You can test your assumptions, and more effectively choose when to change your beliefs. That’s quite the skill for today’s rapidly changing world. Six Sources of Beliefs and Values One of my mentors has a very simple frame for looking at where beliefs come from: 1. Authority – expertise, law, position, policies, etc. 2. Emotion – feelings, convictions, causes, purposes, etc. 3. Intuition – insight, impression, subconscious, etc. 4. Logic – observations, facts, assumptions, formulas, etc. 5. Science – facts, data, biology, sociology, etc. 6. Sensory – personal experience, direct knowledge from the senses, etc. Internal vs. External Sources of Beliefs Another way to look at these sources of beliefs and assumptions is: * Internal – Emotion, Intuition, Sensory * External – Authority, Logic, Science “Fill in the Blank” to Find Your Beliefs I find myself challenging my beliefs and assumptions on a regular basis, to make sure I’m able to leverage new information and insights as they come along. That of course means knowing what my beliefs actually are. One way to dump beliefs out on the table so you can sort through them is to play a “fill in the blank” game. For example, “In order to be successful at Microsoft, I need to … X,Y, and Z” This is simple, but powerful. Know Your Convincer Strategy Related to this, In NLP, there’s the concept of a “Convincer Strategy.” Simply put, it’s — what’s the pattern for how you believe something or how you become convinced something is true? Do you need to see it for yourself? Do you need to hear it from three separate people? Once you know the convincer strategy for yourself and others, it’s easier to understand why some ideas are readily adopted, while others are perpetually dismissed. What’s important is that you can use these simple concepts to be smarter about what you choose to believe and to improve your accuracy around expectations and beliefs about your unfolding reality in an ever-changing world. ________________________________ From: Centroids <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2019 8:20 AM To: [email protected] Cc: Billy Rojas Subject: Re: [RC] Critique of Religion and Philosophy That’s really good. In fact, it is a fascinating question about which of our beliefs we subconsciously refuse to have examined in that manner... Sent from my iPhone > On Feb 16, 2019, at 13:22, Billy Rojas <[email protected]> > wrote: > > One should constantly and deliberately subject one’s beliefs to challenge and > expect them to be modified and shaped in the process. The most important > question to ask when confronting a theologian or philosopher is neither “What > does he mean?” nor “Can I be his disciple?” but “What has he seen?” -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
