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Member (Idle past 5192 days) Posts: 649 From: Melbourne, Australia Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Does Peer Pressure stifle the acceptance of the obvious? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Doubtful. Since most athiests were once believers, I think they would generally be rather sympathetic. They certainly wouldn't kill someone for becoming a believer.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Interesting. In my experience, when a group of scientist friends and I (who all happened to be non-believers) found out (at his wedding) that another one of our group actually was a pretty devout Christian, we didn't do anything at all. Well, we all were kind of surprised that he had kept this from us. In fact, we are all still really close and see each other as much as we can when they come into town. On the other hand, when I tell people who ask that I am a non-believer, I run a pretty good chance of getting a lecture. I got repeatedly insulted to my face about my beliefs and morals by my own sister, and spent an agonizing 5 hours alone in a car with someone who tried to browbeat me into believing. There is a great deal of ignorance about and patronizing condescention from Christians and othr religious people towards non-believers. I mean, look at how you Mormons treat the people who leave your religion, let alone stop believing in the supernatural altogether. Huge rejection from the entire community, right? I don't think this happens to religious people from non-believers anywhere near as much. How could it; it's "normal" to believe in this country, most non-believers grow us indoctrinated into some faith or another. Mostly, I keep my mouth shut about being a non-believer except in really specific circumstances because letting certain sorts of people know carries a great deal of risk. This message has been edited by schrafinator, 11-02-2005 05:06 PM
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: That's not Psychology. That's Psychiatry. Psychology is science.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: So does everybody else in Psychology except the Freudians. FYI.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Most clinical Psychologists I know ar MD/PhD's, but maybe that's not the case with clinical Psychologists in general.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
The funny thing, neither of these people believed in hell, really.
They just couldn't stand that I didn't believe as they did.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: How do you tell the difference between "knowing" and "imagining him in your mind"?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: You knoiw, I did what you suggested, and do you k now what the next thought that popped into my head was? "Damn, this chicken salad I'm eating right now is really good!"
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Huh? My answer was a completely honest one.
quote: Are you saying that God is incapable of making Himself known to me? He must not really want me to believe in him. Or maybe He just can't.
quote: Are you saying that God isn't capable of superceding my lunch?
quote: My my, you have quite the vivid imagination, don't you?.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Awesome.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: ...and that's one reason I don't presume to know for sure if the supernatural exists or not. Nobody really knows. It's not possible to know.
quote: But I wasn't, and I'm not. I was a believer until my mid twenties. I have been a believer longer than I have not believed.
quote: ...or, there's a whole lot of lies you have been telling yourself about what you think is God but is really your own mind and imagination.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: But I am not convinced that there is no God. I am not convinced that there is a God. But I really can't say either way, because nobody knows for sure. So, I'm agnostic when it comes to the supernatural. AbE: FYI, I was mocking you, a little, not God. How can I mock an entity I don't know exists? This message has been edited by schrafinator, 11-04-2005 04:29 PM
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
I was a believer until my mid twenties. quote: Not at all. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. My drifting away from belief happened gradually for many years. I can't say that my faith was ever terribly strong past the age of 10 or so. I had grown up in, let's say, a "difficult" household, and as I went off to college and became more independent, and began to heal myself from my past, the nominal faith just went away. I had only continued with it out of habit and rote, I think.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Nobody really knows. It's not possible to know. quote: That's the same as it not being possible to know if God exists or not. Look, we do know that 1) humans are social animals and 2) that we fear, above all else, the unknown (especially what happens after death) and 3) that large groups of them, self-perpetuated over many generations can be convinced of the truth of something despite a lack of verifiable evidence and 4) many of us are quite willing to believe a comforting falsehood or fabricated story about that which frightens us than remain unsure or fearful about it. All of this we KNOW, riverrat. It isn't something that only I know and cannot convince others to believe out of love. It is simply a list of facts that anyone can observe for themselves. Nobody has to take anybody else's word for it, nor do they have to just believe. Now, you would like me to abandon this knowledge; to turn my back on it as though it doesn't exist.
But I wasn't, and I'm not. I was a believer until my mid twenties. I have been a believer longer than I have not believed. quote: No, I can't say that I do.
quote: That, I am afraid, is a much longer post than I should write here. But, let's say that the process by which I stopped believing in God was extremely similar to the process by which I stopped believing in Santa Claus. Really.
quote: Of course. What other reason would there be to believe? And as for the "laughing story"... I really wish you had a much more skeptical mind and understood how much you indulge in Confirmation Bias and Post-Hoc Reasoning. I also wish you could take a step back and gain some knowledge about human group dynamics and the power of the human mind to deceive itself. I think you greatly underestimate our vulnerability to all of these things. Now I have a question for you. If you could somehow find out, with certainty, if it were true that God exists and everything you believe about how God has intervened in your personal affairs, OR that all of your belief in God and all of your experiences that you think prove His existence and actions in your life were actually just you, working extra hard all this time to convince yourself of the truth because you so desperately want it to be true, would you? Would you want to know if you were deceiving yourself all this time, or not? This message has been edited by schrafinator, 11-06-2005 02:52 PM
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: It's true, I'm not easily offended, and I do know that the Rat likes to kid. He's not very good at it, mind you, but hey, it's fun to watch him try. We only tease the ones we love, rat.
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