Belief... or lack thereof

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pocaracas said:
I’m all for understanding the Numinous… but I’d like that Numinous to be evident, before I move on to accepting it as part of reality.
Until then, I can understand it as much as I understand why Joffrey Baratheon was a bad king of Westeros… or how Dragons can be dormant in their eggs for millennia… or how you can share minds with other people… or how you can slingshot around the Sun for traveling through time… how anger can make your body increase in mass and strength and turn green, while not ripping your pants apart… etc… etc… etc…
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Well, then, in order to understand God, who is beyond human comprehension (otherwise, it is not God that you’re describing, but a superhero), you need to use analogies.

Human languages constructs and deconstructs human matters, so when human terms are applied to God they necessarily are deficient and inadequate

If you avoid using analogies, you can almost say literally NOTHING about God.
But this is not the kind of understanding you’re interested in, is it?
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It is indeed the same kind of understanding I’m interested in. What an odd question.
 
pocaracas said:
Seems rather circular, now…

oh wait, you said it can’t… there can’t “not be enough time in time to account for all the time”… so… there is enough time in time to account for all the time. QED. 😃
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Except…that we are in the present moment.

So…

That means there wasn’t an infinite past.

#logic 🙂
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
The Catholic faith is not some truth that was just waiting to be discovered by the various peoples of the Earth.
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On the contrary, this is exactly what it is!

Acts 17:26 And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, 27 that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, 28 for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Mike_from_NJ said:
Catholicism may, in fact, be true; but it’s not because people sought to find its God. They were presented with this and made judgement calls from there – in much the same way there are people today are using their judgements by either joining and leaving Catholicism and the litany of other faiths.
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Yes. Catholicism is not resulted from man seeking God, though He does fashion us to do so, but results from Him reaching out to us.

Each soul is presented with a “judgment call” or choice to reject or accept Him.
 
MPat said:
In the “bet” described by Pascal one can try to win by betting on the option that is more likely to be true (“Win by truth”, as I have called it) or by betting on the option maximising the gain (“Win by profit”).
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Ah… ok, I get it…
Do the two intersect?
MPat said:
It would have worked better with a smile. 🙂

I’ll also note that you haven’t given a different interpretation to the quotes I have given. You also haven’t given any example of your open-mindedness in action (no, ritual repetition that you give theism tiny positive probability does not really count). Thus your only evidence here is your words. Which leads me to a question: do you think people do notice, when they are closed-minded?
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Good question… I don’t know if they notice it…
Look how these two persons answer the same question:
liberalgeek.com/sites/default/files/what_would_change_your_mind.jpg

The quotes you gave before have little to do with any closed-mindedness of mine.
One is about a question concerning the fact that humans seem to do all the work of convincing other humans about the existence of that God that could do it all by Himself in a much more convincing manner.
The other is about how those humans that are convincing the other humans are seemingly exploiting flaws of the human psyche.
If this is my mind being closed, then… I’m not sure I want to open it…
To know how my psyche can be exploited and just go ahead and allow it to happen?
MPat said:
Thanks, that’s clearer. Yet in that case the conspiracy theorists would seem to be much better examples than the ones reporting near-death experiences (I’d expect you to think that they are misinterpreting real misleading perceptions - that would be just being mistaken).
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NDE claimants are directly misinterpreting their perceptions, or inner experiences.
Conspiracy theorists are misinterpreting the collection of reports they get about a particular event.

Both are rationalizing something about which they have insufficient data… and both are seemingly arriving at the wrong conclusion, but convinced that it is right. The self-delusion is that self-convincing part, I’d say…
MPat said:
Really…? Do you have any evidence to support this view (that self-delusion “only works if the person is unaware of the possibility for that delusion”)?
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Evidence… oh well, on a quick google search I came across this nice
blog post by a psychiatrist, concerning the problematic of avoiding self-delusion… One of the main mechanisms: self-awareness.
MPat said:
But doesn’t your confidence in this “shield from self-delusion” remove all benefits from such awareness? 🙂
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Benefits from awareness of?..
The shield is composed of the awareness of how self-delusion can work.
MPat said:
That point was supposed to defend your claim that evidence for all religions is very similar. I’m afraid that the only way for this evidence to be irrelevant would be if your point was irrelevant.
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But… I tried following the quotes and got up to this:
pocaracas said:
huh?
Sadly, the only sort of access that seems available relies on exploiting some features of how your brain works. And those work equally well for any religion, any God, any belief… even the belief that my wife is not cheating on me.
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This “access” was about the access to information about the deity (or the Numinous) of Catholicism… how the tales of that access seem to exploit some psychological flaws in human acceptance of claims… and how such exploitation is equivalent to what happens in other religions.
I’ve been talking about psychology, all along…
That’s why I said that the claimed evidence wasn’t relevant.
MPat said:
As I have said, I do not see a practical difference between them.
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Makes sense… there’s no practical difference.
There’s only an intellectual difference.
Like I said earlier, I can’t be intellectually honest and claim that gods are impossible. But I can claim that they seem improbable.
MPat said:
But OK, if you feel so strongly about that, I can reword it to “Also, it looks like ‘the methodology applied to foster the belief’ (or working hypothesis) is ‘pretty much equivalent’ among ‘several religions’ and your atheism.”.

As I have noted, you have said that you are reluctant to accept any statement that might lead you away from atheism, and you have said you “avoid looking repeatedly for the same immaterial thing”. Maybe you should explain how that is different from “the methodology applied to foster the belief” you see in different religions?

Oh, and let’s add one more quote for you to explain (from the point of view of open-mindedness as well):

Good luck. 🙂
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Thank you! 🙂

The different religions foster a belief in whatever they do believe.
My avoidance is an attempt to prevent myself from blindingly accepting any religious claim without proper evidence going for it.
[cont.d]
 
[cont.]
MPat said:
Maybe. I think your argument goes a bit like this:
  1. Majority of the people accept their religions because of similar “bad” reasons (for example, authority) that are not based on evidence. (premise)
  2. It is OK to ignore evidence that is not used by most people. (premise)
  3. All that is left are the similar “bad” reasons. (from 1, 2)
  4. Evidence for all religions is very similar. (from 3)
As you can see, this argument has one extremely questionable premise (the second one), and ends up changing “reasons to believe” to “evidence” (it might have more problems, but that will be enough). Thus it doesn’t work and the claim about all religions having very similar evidence is still baseless.
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Indeed that argument would have been terrible.
Good thing I wasn’t making it, huh?
MPat said:
And that’s why I pointed out that it is not a good idea to think that evidence is irrelevant. We do not ignore evidence for heliocentrism or QM just because Little Johnny’s belief in them is based on words of the teacher. So, why should we ignore evidence for Little Jonnhy’s religion, just because his belief is based on words of his teacher (or mother)?
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Don’t do that… that’s silly. You know it’s silly. Why go there?
MPat said:
All that would only be relevant if you could take “reasons for belief” instead of evidence.
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And we were talking about “reasons for belief”, weren’t we?
At least, that’s what I’ve been doing all along…
MPat said:
So, I have offered an analogy, you have tried to defuse it with an analogy of your own, it didn’t work (looks like neither of us knows how your analogy was supposed to work), and now you think that’s a reason to drop my analogy? Um, I don’t think it works that way. Instead, you get to answer my analogy about sticks once again. 🙂
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Once more, “similar” is a very relative word. What I consider similar, you may not.
That’s why you’re resisting my claim that every religion has a very similar methodology in how it convinces people to believe in it. Our measure of similarity is different, apparently.
 
PRmerger said:
Well, then, in order to understand God, who is beyond human comprehension (otherwise, it is not God that you’re describing, but a superhero), you need to use analogies.

Human languages constructs and deconstructs human matters, so when human terms are applied to God they necessarily are deficient and inadequate

If you avoid using analogies, you can almost say literally NOTHING about God.
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Well then… if our language is that ineffective, how can anyone claim to know anything about that God?
How did they come across that information?
PRmerger said:
It is indeed the same kind of understanding I’m interested in. What an odd question.
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🙂
 
pocaracas said:
One is about a question concerning the fact that humans seem to do all the work of convincing other humans about the existence of that God that could do it all by Himself in a much more convincing manner.
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What would that look like? IOW: how do you think God could prove to you, by Himself, His existence?
 
PRmerger said:
Except…that we are in the present moment.

So…

That means there wasn’t an infinite past.

#logic 🙂
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Except that we’re not the ones who must account for all time… time is. We’re finite, we understand finite.
 
pocaracas said:
Time is what needs to account for itself. You agreed to that, I think.
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Sorry, I don’t agree with this.

Time is an inanimate, immaterial concept, so it doesn’t need to account for anything. It is not responsible for anything, to anyone because it is…inanimate.

So I don’t know what you’re getting at.
We humans can’t count all the (potentially) infinite time… but if time is infinite, then it has already accounted for all of it.
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If time is infinite…right.

But you’ve already admitted that saying time is infinite (in the past) is nonsense.

So…🤷
 
PRmerger said:
Sorry, I don’t agree with this.

Time is an inanimate, immaterial concept, so it doesn’t need to account for anything. It is not responsible for anything, to anyone because it is…inanimate.

So I don’t know what you’re getting at.
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Hasn’t time had enough time to get from infinity to now?
PRmerger said:
If time is infinite…right.

But you’ve already admitted that saying time is infinite (in the past) is nonsense.

So…🤷
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I said infinite time is nonsense? :eek:
 
pocaracas said:
Intellect can only take you so far…
To check if the results from the intellect match with reality, we need something extra.
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OH!!! How I am amused at this!

You are absolutely, 100% correct on this!



What you have asserted above is nothing but your tacit acceptance of Catholic teaching.

You are simply echoing what Pope JP2 said in his magnificent encyclical, Fides Et Ratio.

Yes, intellect is great…but it can only take you so far.

Kudos to you for being so Catholic in saying this!
 
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