Let’s take a few minutes on the couch.

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Some people care less about facts, and more about feeling good. Sometimes I envy those people.

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If anything, pity them.

[Trantor]

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"I would argue that the vast majority of humans prefer to NOT use their brain in this manner, but rather have someobody else do that and tell them the results."

AMEN!!

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That is their brains way of making sense of the world! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]
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Some people care less about facts, and more about feeling good. Sometimes I envy those people.

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If anything, pity them.

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Ignorance is bliss, right? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

In my worldview, sometimes it's hard to reconcile knowing the truth/facts with being happy. If you had to choose between the two -- knowing the facts/truth, or being happy -- which do you choose? I'd rather have both, but sometimes that might not be an option.

[imported_luckyme]

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Wouldn't we ALL like to believe that there is a better place waiting for us where our existence will never end, that evil will not go unpunished, and that someone is looking after us?

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Even if that was all that a god-belief entailed, it still doesn't sound that appealling. Fortunately, there are more negative issues involved with a god-belief and there's no danger that atheists that arrive at their position from a more philisophical approach rather than just a 'there's no evidence' approach are pretty insulated from a few supposed treats.

luckyme,
if I thought I was wrong, I'd change my mind

[imported_luckyme]

[ QUOTE ]
If you had to choose between the two -- knowing the facts/truth, or being happy -- which do you choose?

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In a fun way you can divide people into two camps
a)- It's true, therefore I'm happy
b)- I'm happy, therefore it's true.

(a) usually plays out more in a 'search for truth' makes me happy.
(b) plays out on several levels and seems related to arguments like "we've always done it that way" , "everybody does it this way".

skeptical vs affirmation approachs

luckyme,
if I thought I was wrong, I'd change my mind

[kbfc]

It's important that you don't deemphasize the other factors, such as irrationality and ignorance, etc.. The psychological aspect is mostly important because of the way it lets these other flaws thrive. It also probably accounts for why irrationality and ignorance don't just lead to a billion different nonsensical religions, rather the output coelesces into a fairly small number of religions, due to societal and family pressures, for example.

As for Atheists being driven there by psychological forces, perhaps it's true in some cases, but I doubt it's as widespread as you'd like to think. It's certainly not an ego thing; it's a rationality thing. I've taken the position where I hold reason and rationality in high esteem. I'm also able to think lucidly enough to seperate pyschological drives from logical reasoning.

A personal example:
As a teenager, I was very serious about calling myself 'agnostic.' I ridiculed 'atheism' as being egotistical and pompous. After reading the Asimov passage I quoted here awhile back, I immediately changed, and have called myself an 'atheist' ever since. It was a simple realization that Asimov's argument made sense that prompted my change, regardless of any spite or disdain I may have previously held toward the position.

Anyway, I made note in my posts that you're referring to, that atheists aren't necessarily universally free from these types of psychological issues. But some, maybe most, are. And it's 100% for the believers.

[David Sklansky]

"I can remember when I was ten and positively said to myself that their is no God. I don't see this as the result of any psychological problem but simply as the result of considering what to me made sense. I would say I had a psychological need to "know" what is and isn't the case, ie a need to make rational enquiries and come to conclusions (sound or not is another matter!) based on those enquiries (or presented information).

I equally believe most believers in God did not end up believing in God because of any psychological problems.

There is a commonality to both sides. The human brain is wired up to attempt to make sense of the world of which it is concious of (whether by design by God or evolutionary demands is irrelevant to the point)and different folks make sense of the world in different ways.

I am talking in broad terms, but I trust you get the basic thesis here."

I agree. A high percentage believe because their lack of knowledge or weak thinking ability leads them to believe. They are of course pushed further along by psychological reasons but that isn't the main motivater for them. However most of the religious posters on this forum do not have those intellectual handicaps. Ergo, they are not playing with a full deck.

[RJT]

You do realize that this:

[ QUOTE ]
It's certainly not an ego thing; it's a rationality thing. I've taken the position where I hold reason and rationality in high esteem. I'm also able to think lucidly enough to seperate pyschological drives from logical reasoning.

…It was a simple realization that Asimov's argument made sense that prompted my change, regardless of any spite or disdain I may have previously held toward the position.

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Contradicts this:

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Isaac Asimov:
Quote:
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

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don’t you?

He decided based on emotion. Until he took the leap with his emotions, he was a by-stander. He relied on his logic. That is, logically we cannot know whether God or no god (Which is correct of course.).

If you have no problem saying believers succumb to their psychology and atheists succumb to their emotions; then I have no problem hearing it.

[RJT]

It is going to take me a while to respond to your posts. There are quite a few assumptions in there that simply don’t apply.

In the meantime, if you could find any post of mine where my logic was flawed it would be helpful to the discussion. First you will have to find a post where I tried to use logic to discuss my Religion. That will be hard to do, as I think it is absurd to say Faith is logical - or that my faith in Jesus comes from some deductive reasoning.

If you revisit the posts from last night regarding the Bible you will see that it was I trying to explain to you that there is not proof in the Bible. You insisted that if there is some type of even “maybes” then that gets us somewhere. It gets us nowhere, if one is trying to logically deduce Religion. The closest it gets us is to say “hmmm, nah” or “hmmm, I am going for it.”

[jester710]

As the only person in this forum who is still undecided on the God debate (or so it seems), I feel like my two cents might be of some use here.

First, some background info: if asked, I will still identify myself as a Christian. This is largely because I inherited my faith ("force-fed" is not applicable here, and I find that term insulting), and I still like the idea of God. That is to say, I would prefer that God exist. Clearly, that is a psychological factor in my "belief," if you can call it that.

If you really examined my life, however, I think you would find that I'm a practicing agnostic. I live my life without any real consideration of God at all, even though I still nominally believe in Him. Over the past few years, I've been scrutinizing my belief, to see if I should take it more seriously or abandon it completely. I still don't know, but this forum is occasionally helpful to me.

At this point, I don't see how abandoning my belief (weak as it is) could be all that helpful to me. I'd still feel bound to do the right thing by my personal morals, even if I didn't have a religious faith that required moral acts. I suppose the only benefit is that I would lose the occasional guilt I feel over not taking my faith more seriously.

Also, I don't see how the atheists can deny any sort of psychological aspect to their non-belief. Granted, many of them can make a fine intellectual case as well, but many of the posts to this thread have been from atheists who say religion makes them angry because of religious people. That is not the religion's fault, and if you don't believe in order to spite people, then that's certainly a psychological factor.

One last thing, for what it's worth: from my childhood to my first few years in college, I was very active in church and Christian-related organizations. I read my Bible every day, things like that. I never "felt" God or anything like that, though, nothing like what other Christians said had happened to them. Midway through college, I decided that it would be more honest to just abandon the good Christian charade and see what would happen. I have since been living the practical agnostic lifestyle, which is more honest for me at this point in time. I can state with 100% certainty, though, that I was happier before, even though I was just going through the motions. I know this doesn't prove anything, and that it could be a result of completely unrelated factors, but I thought I'd throw it out there all the same.