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Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt th

Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings. And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.

pdonis 5y ago
> most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling. For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.
- savingsPossible 5y ago
  This was interesting, but also somewhat paradoxical. A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :) But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept
- tonymet 5y ago
  This 90% figure includes core beliefs of the world, right and wrong, history, epistemology and so on.
pdonis 5y ago
> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality. For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation. However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > it's just that they have no practical impact at all, That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance. Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.
chakkepolja 5y ago
> And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. Had they reasoned about them, most 2000 year old customs would have hardly survived.
- Retric 5y ago
  They reason within the framework of those ideas. If you accept a religious text is accurate and find an obvious contradiction then rather than rejecting the religious text you’re going to try and justify both statements as true. So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
arp242 5y ago
The difference is that there is usually at least the presumption or expectation of evidence, even though many don't know all the details. Don't expect me to be able to explain all of cosmology or evolutionary history either, but I do know enough to know that it's based on the best available evidence available today. Mistakes do happen, and are corrected. With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation. These are vastly different situations.
colordrops 5y ago
People have plenty of time, they just don't have the motivation.
jjk166 5y ago
I've been told bad things would happen to me if I stick my head in a hungry lion's mouth. I've never tried it to verify. Is not-sticking-my-head-into-the-mouth-of-a-hungry-lionism a religion? There is a difference between belief and faith.

pdonis 5y ago

> most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling. For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.

savingsPossible 5y ago
This was interesting, but also somewhat paradoxical. A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :) But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept
tonymet 5y ago
This 90% figure includes core beliefs of the world, right and wrong, history, epistemology and so on.

pdonis 5y ago

> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.

BackBlast 5y ago
I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality. For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation. However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > it's just that they have no practical impact at all, That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance. Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.

chakkepolja 5y ago

> And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. Had they reasoned about them, most 2000 year old customs would have hardly survived.

Retric 5y ago
They reason within the framework of those ideas. If you accept a religious text is accurate and find an obvious contradiction then rather than rejecting the religious text you’re going to try and justify both statements as true. So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

arp242 5y ago

The difference is that there is usually at least the presumption or expectation of evidence, even though many don't know all the details. Don't expect me to be able to explain all of cosmology or evolutionary history either, but I do know enough to know that it's based on the best available evidence available today. Mistakes do happen, and are corrected. With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation. These are vastly different situations.

colordrops 5y ago

People have plenty of time, they just don't have the motivation.

jjk166 5y ago

I've been told bad things would happen to me if I stick my head in a hungry lion's mouth. I've never tried it to verify. Is not-sticking-my-head-into-the-mouth-of-a-hungry-lionism a religion? There is a difference between belief and faith.