Agnostic.com

29 4

Why do otherwise rational people believe in GOD?

#god
Niteflyr 4 Oct 8
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

29 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

10

Because they did not come to this conclusion from common sense but from indoctrination which overrides logic

if one's conclusion came from indoctrination, does he fit rationality? Is he properly called rational? because, the question refers to that? C.S. Lewis for example, was his conversion to Christianity made by indoctrination? Lee Strobel:? Did his conclusion made by a process of indoctrination?

@Raham C.S Lewis was born in to the Christian faith .He was not born into an Atheist family .As you know he became an Atheist and then returned to being a believer.It is a very well known fact that very few people that are born into an atheist environment become believers

6

Why do otherwise rational people go crazy during contested divorces?

4

Because it's comforting. They want to believe they will see there loved ones again. I think it also has to do with not wanting to not exist.

their There! I fixed it!

4

It is the compartmentalization, cognitive dissonance, contorted logic and improbable conjecture things that they use to try and reconcile the contradictions and improbability of the things stated in their holy books.

4

Emotional needs come first. Most people aren't rational so much as they rationalize.

Don't answer the question, I think.

@Raham If emotional needs for believing in God take precedence over the need to be rational, how does it not answer the question?

3

They're scared of death.

3

Religious thinking is generally based on the belief in the existence of supernatural forces in the world. By definition they are beyond natural, one can say paranormal. At best this can make you believe in miracles or unicorns, but more often than not it can induces deep paranoia (and quite often unconsciously). The accumulation of this unconscious paranoia eventually leads to a break down of rational thinking, as all explanations end up being attributed to paranormal causes.

A close look at history/ancient civilisations clearly reveals a pattern of how the belief in supernatural forces developed in a certain ancient human society as a core pillar of it's world view which in turn seems to have enabled it to spread in the same way that the Black Plague did throughout Europe in the 14th century or Capitalism in the 19th.

3

I think the simple answer is... brainwashing.

3

Rational people don't believe in a god. Loaded question....

3

Because some people will bend over backwards, physically and mentally, for anything that strokes their ego and gives them a light buzz.

Drug addicts can be intelligent, until the cravings eats their sanity.

3

I think it is so they have someone to take accountability for their shitty life. If something is going wrong, it's "God's plan". It would be fantastic to have someone looking out for you, to be planning your life successes, and making sure all the prayers paid off.

For people who say they value personal responsibility, Christianity is a total abdication of personal responsibility. Notice how god acts like the ultimate nanny state. Pharaoh won't let you go? God, the socialist will take care of it for free! Sins too many? Socislist Jesus subsidizes it for nothing. 🙂

@WanderingRain not true. Jesus asks you to give up your life and turn from sin.

Yes, belief is a real comfort to people. Maybe too comfortable. It might be healthy even. The brain doesn’t need something to be true to feel comfort, only to believe.

3

Just a thought...GOD could be an acronym for good orderly direction...otherwise I got nothing

I like the acronym idea~~however, believing/trusting in an almighty god (aka imaginary safety net) was very dangerous in my story.

3

That's easy. Humans are programmed genetically to follow their parents like imprinted ducklings. That's why kids are gullible enough to believe in Santa. In developmental states, let's us a parent tells a child, "don't swim in the river. There're aligators in there." The non-believers don't make it to adulthood to reproduce so the trait goes extinct. Those that carry it don't live on.

this is a huge part of the continuation and spread of religion! indoctrination works really well, BECAUSE it is a survival trait.

@HereticSin Quite so. Susan Blackmore, a disciple of Richard Dawkins, tells us of a meme-defined gene. Those that carry the memeplex have a better chance of reproducing. Take being a Christian in a Bible Belt culture. If you carry the ideology, you have a better chance of marrying and reproducing.

3

Everybody's doing it. Along with an almost complete lack of critical thinking in this country. I suspect that an atheist or agnostic would not get very far in politics nowadays.

3

At the heart of the debate lies—it seems to me—the fundamental belief, or lack thereof, in the dichotomy of what Stephen Jay Gould referred to as non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA). In such a worldview, science has its domain, while religion has its own separate space—the two don’t overlap. And while I do not subscribe to this point of view, it nevertheless allows—if not promotes—a ‘compartmentalization’ of the mind. And Gould may have been on to something here. Let us admit that, whether it be anti-vax'ers, the anti-GMO crowd, believers in UFOs, conspiracy theorists, those who truly believe in reincarnation or ghosts, or just the average, run-of-the-mill religionist, clearly the human brain is capable of holding both rational and irrational opinions simultaneously.

That's the argument that religionists use to legitimize their lunacy. It's pure BS, of course.

@ldheinz Yes I quite agree, they do not make compartments, the irrational is allowed to invade every other part of their thinking, and then to attack the thinking of others, the NOM can never work because one side, the religious do not even see any boundaries.

@Fernapple a lot of religion is emotional, a different part f the brain that is powerful. When the emotional brain is working for safety, the cognitive rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex is not connected, it’s off line so to speak

@KittiPerry I was addressing the philosophy of religion rather than the psychology, but be that as it may, I am still happy to try an answer.

What you say is certainly true but we do not spend all our life in high emotion. We all should, and many do, step back and evaluate with the rational brain. That people do not, and do not understand the need to do so, is the fault of western education systems. Which are all too willing to willfully neglect the teaching of the need for carefull thought and good thinking in order to avoid the conflict with their need to indoctrinate. It has been pointed out before, that education in the west tends to be dominated by an unnatural pairing of the far religious right and the far liberal left. So much so, that it is a common-place to say. "I do not agree with what the left/right stand for but at least many of them do good work in the schools." Yet of course the reason why those two groups are dominant in education and happy to come together with those who you would think are their natural enemies, is because they both share a mutual need to indoctrinate, and therefore thought and education are supressed by the very people who are employed to educate. This is the main reason why people are happy to accept emotional proof only, because that is how they were trained to think.

3

Bingo!!!

2

I don’t know thousands of years of social conditioning, a need to oblige ones parents, and in some cases to be able to comfortably work and succeed in an environment that heavily dominated by religious ideology.

2

Some people were indoctrinated as a child,while others or willing to deny reality and believe in God just because they want to believe. And I have seen others still yet give in to the scare tactics of religion. Take Evel Knievel for example, he converted to religion on his deathbed so he would not go to hell and suffer for all eternity with torment, Pain And his worst fears,but rather a lifetime of sin would be all forgotten and he would reap the benefits of heaven for all eternity.

Some people have wonderful religious experiences, and don’t know that they are just normal physiological reactions. They believe they were touched by God, that these are supernatural. Modern brain science shows how these experience happen.

2

Some reasons that people become Christians are social pressure and the expectations of others, personal crises or suffering, the teachings of parents, schools and other institutions, a -felt need for something to depend on, etc. But why people believe is in fact beside the point of whether what they believe is fact.

2

Conditioning, and because they want to. It’s the comforting aspect of sky daddies.

2

I think so many were raised in it and were expected to believe, when they question it as a child their questions are dismissed usually or rationalized away and the person becomes used to it

2

I have yet to figure that one out ! Illogical on all levels.

What is illogical about it?

1

It really seems to boil down to wishful thinking.

SCal Level 7 Nov 28, 2018
1

Peer pressure has more to do with it than we'd ordinarily think.

1

I don't know.... I am a perfectionist by nature and trusted with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. It only took seeing the very first two contradictions in the bible to know that it couldn't have been written by a good god. Jesus dissipated immediately, it took a month or two to see that my religion was fake, and for the god belief to die...I have since found thousands of contradictions and many hundreds of places where god is doing evil, sinful, wicked things...There are people around me that KNOW these things are in the book....but believe it anyway. I find that very scary. I am convinced that we were evidently designed with different kinds of brains...

I believe more would come to reality if they understood more about how the brain works, and how deceit works..

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:196541
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.