Not a lot I’m afraid. Probably need a legally trained person to differentiate the finer points between a and b. But having said that, how did you arrive that a) is correct for you? How did you verify that is the right belief?
So… you’re asking me how I verified that my lack of belief “is the right belief”? Does this question make sense to you?
The other question, “how did I arrive that “lack of belief” is correct for me”, is a bit better, but still strange…
I don’t think I arrived at such a conclusion, ever… I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok. I see no problem with not believing in any god.
If it is just a decision you made without justification, then it is difficult to talk much about it. But you won’t come here to post your decision without any justification, would you?
In fact I think that was the main thrust of your post. Inviting folks to challenge your belief. Perhaps I’ll cut back on my other post and just focus on your belief system.
Like I said earlier, I don’t think that, generally, a belief is something that people arrive at rationally (Of course, I may be wrong).
Often, you believe what you’re told due to several factors:
- evidence presented
- trustworthiness of the person conveying the information
- charisma of the person conveying the information
…
People don’t always go for the first as the primary means to accept a particular claim. And the second one is a bit exploited by believing parents.
Once you believe what you’re told, you then believe in the concept that was conveyed and live out your life as if that is true.
Evidence may then be presented which strengthens this belief. That evidence may be faulty, but you will tend to accept it as valid - a common example is the Argumentum ad populum (e.g. if 2 billion people believe in this, then they must be right).
For those who don’t believe in that thing, the fault of a particular argument for that belief is intrinsically easier to spot. No emotional connection exists to the correctness of the the belief, no desire to keep it going… and, in some cases, there’s a desire to stop it.
The same happens for any field of knowledge, where knowledge can be defined as “justified true belief”… justified, due to the evidence presented, true due to unbiased support from unconcerned or unrelated minds, belief because, philosophically speaking, we can’t ever know anything with 100% certainty… there’s always some room for error, so one has to ultimately believe in everything.
In science, only the evidence gets credit for convincing people. Even mathematical proofs are seen with some mistrust, requiring physical verification.
But I digress…
Typical belief, the kind present in religion, is, usually, first arrived at by some emotional connection to the subject matter or the person conveying it.
One mechanism is through trust in the parental figure - a trust encoded in our genes throughout evolution to help our young selves to stay away from harm, without having to experience it.
Another one is to play with people’s base desires…
People desire to life forever - religion provides the assurance that they will.
People want to help others, even if they can’t physically provide any help - prayer accomplishes that.
People want to be special and have some purpose in this world - religion provides that feeling.
I’m sure there could be many more examples, but any of these mechanisms is an emotional pathway for belief. Not a rational one. As such, the justifications provided by people for their belief tend to be these emotional ones… which, although satisfying to the self, are utterly useless to anyone who wishes to establish if the concepts being believed do have some basis in reality.
Pascal’s Wager is disguised as a rational mechanism… but fails because it then asks for the emotional belief which is not there.