A strange inversion of values

Thread Hop

Without reading too much into the analogy I'm about to make, I suppose it's like this. Last month, we had a magician come to campus and do a few tricks for us. It was pretty entertaining, even to someone pretty jaded who knows it's not "real". After it was over with, a friend of mine who knew how they were done, wanted to explain how to me and others, to which I promptly responded "No, that's okay. I'd rather keep my childlike sense of wonder." I suspect that how that girl feels about her faith. As for whether it's a majority opinion, I think it's less "I don't want to be told it's not true" and more "I vaguely believe this, if only because I go through the motions."

I have a friend who made up his own religion one time. In it, he talked to spirits and dead people. There was an afterlife, but only for people he liked. Also, Hermes the Greek god was there for some reason, even though he made up the rest.

I told him it didn't make sense, and he agreed with me. He then told me that he'd decided that happiness was more important to him than truth, and he'd decided to believe something he knew was false.

I tried arguing with him about it, but then he told me he started believing all of it after his dad died. I felt like kind of a jerk, so I didn't bring it up again, and I'm not sure if he still believes it or not.

So yeah, people believe all kinds of things they know are false. It actually kind of makes sense. I mean, if believing or not believing something has no real effect on your life, then why not just do what makes you happy?

I think shutting yourself off from science to try and 'protect' your belief in God is a bad idea. I mean, if you believe God created the world, then surely by learning more about it you are learning more about Him? Surely science ought to be a holy profession that strengthens your sense of wonder, not destroys it.

Sure. What I don't get is, how do they do it? I mean, believing entails thinking that something is true, n'est-ce que pas? So how can I think that something I know to be false, is true? I simply do not get how it's done.

I mean, I do get unconscious suppression of an idea. I'm pretty sure I'm suppressing some ideas right now, because I feel more comfortable that way. But I don't do it consciously. The moment I start getting conscious about it, I have to either accept this idea, or I have to find another way to explain things so I can still not believe it. What I cannot do is know that I'm suppressing it, and still do it.

Well, sometimes you just... think about something for a little while, but then after some time you decide "This is too hard for me and I don't like where it's leading me". Then you just shove it to the back of your mind and don't look at it again.

I've done that, not with religion but with other things.

Doublethink.

No really, it's an actual thing people can do. Orwell just gave it a cool name.

Can Willing Suspension of Disbelief apply to religion?

People are pretty good at lying to themselves. Religion is just one of the best documented cases of it.

I don't even think it has to be tied to religion, it's just that there doesn't seem to be a mass target area otherwise, though I think that might change in the future. It's in our contemporary society's nature to fragment and confuse, in some ways being very anti-certain on the personal philosophy level.

I wouldn't say it was hedonistic per se. It's almost self-empowering on another level. A comparison I've used in the past is looking elsewhere, somewhere otherworldly, and digesting your findings as if you were looking at a (good quality) Romantic-era painting, for example. Humanist largely, both idealistic and cynical at different times because the individual is inherently shaky and unstable like that.

That's how I try to consider the essentially unanswerable, and apparently I'm an agnostic theist.

/1950s.