To All Philosophy People: The Question of Belief.

[hurlyburly]

It's tangibles vs intangibles. You can believe or disbelieve a given statistic or mathematical probability either before or after you see additional evidence or figure out how it was derived. True nature is available to you. This is where I think the observable world exists. So, yes, you can safely believe something will occur 100% of the time.

When it comes to intangibles, believing has additional options. You can actively believe, passively believe, actively disbelieve and passively disbelieve. None of these four options can be wrong or more right than the other three. I put actively believing and passively disbelieving the furthest apart on the spectrum.

Passively disbelieving can be obtained either when the option is presented and not understood or through ignorance of it's existence, and at those times is not a "belief" at all. Any time the option is presented and refuted or rejected it would be an "active disbelief" and therefore indeed be a "belief".

My point is that you are correct and the other post is wrong.

[hurlyburly]

[ QUOTE ]
While we all have beliefs, I can see quite clearly that the purpose of reflection, or attempting to 'know the self' is the process of unraveling beliefs accumulated throughout one's life. In theory there should be a point where mind just 'see's things as they are', and doesn't add anything to them (read belief).

[/ QUOTE ]

I basically restated what he says here.

[Bodhi]

The OP said:[ QUOTE ]
While we all have beliefs, I can see quite clearly that the purpose of reflection, or attempting to 'know the self' is the process of unraveling beliefs accumulated throughout one's life. In theory there should be a point where mind just 'see's things as they are', and doesn't add anything to them (read belief).

[/ QUOTE ]
...and you interpreted this as:
[ QUOTE ]
I take it to mean beliefs surrounding spirituality, like genuflecting when you enter a church or sacrificing a goat to get rain for crops. Believing something or even in something is different than having a system of beliefs.

So when his teacher said "belief is the sickness of man" my interpretation is "conformity for the sake of inclusion is wrong, we should use our noodles to determine what is best and why and be self-assured enough follow our own conclusions".

[/ QUOTE ]

Two blind men touch an elephant, and one says.... [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[hurlyburly]

LOL, now I'm wondering what I missed... I reread his post after you asked and felt silly for paraphrasing (it was unintentional).

I'll break down my thought process here, it may be flawed:

"While we all have beliefs" - I picked this as a reference to the gentle social brainwashing that occurs while we're young. I wanted to post a correction of "while we are all GIVEN beliefs". I may be putting a perspective on this that wasn't intended.

"I can see quite clearly that the purpose of reflection, or attempting to 'know the self' is the process of unraveling beliefs accumulated throughout one's life." - We get an endless supply of new data contrary to what we learned before, whether we do anything with it or extrapolate is by choice.

"In theory there should be a point where mind just 'see's things as they are', and doesn't add anything to them (read belief)." - Self-enlightenment.

Maybe I was way off-base, it was pretty clear to me. What did I miss?

[Bodhi]

I don't think you missed anything. Your interpretation is definitely more social-psychological than what we were discussing before, which is what threw me off.

nice post.