In my lifetime, I converted from one religion to another...   choice.

Are you referring to the 'my god is the default god because it is my god' argument, then that's a different gripe entirely.  A valid gripe there, I would say.

I sometimes wonder how many Christians out there really don't believe in that shit but pretend to - either only to others for social acceptance or even to themselves out of a lingering fear of hell.

I could try to make myself believe that 2 + 2 = 7. But it wouldn't work as 2 + 2 = 7 is just so obviously wrong. Also, the first time I tried to pay a bill for $7 by handing the clerk 2 $1 bills and then 2 more, he'd either think I was insane or an idiot. Same goes for a literal view of the Bible in a way - I know that the Earth being 6,000 years old is an extreme underestimate, as I know the "soul" is an incoorect concept of consciousness, that people do not ever come back to life after rigor mortis has set in and that it is not possible for every species of animal to fit on a ship that could be built out of wood and still float.

The problem with that is it's 2 different kinds of "believe in." One is an opinion the other is based on fact. Actually when you say "I believe in X" It can mean either

1. You believe that X exists or

2. You trust X.

Someone who says "I believe in Psychics" means they believe psychics exist, but doesn't necesarrily trust them (1) while someone who says "I believe in president Bush means (2) - because someone whould need to be insane to not believe he exists (ok they'd have to be insane to mean it the other way too, but you know what I mean.) Interestingly, when someone says that they believe in God, they normally mean both.

As far as I'm concerned, believing the Bible is as incorrect as believing that 2 + 2 = 7.

What I'm saying is you can't really just decide "hmmm I think I'm going to be a Christian." Almost everyone is the religion they are raised in. People do convert - often to please a SO or because someone convinces them to believe what they do - or because they are rational enough and willing to admit that all religions are bullshit.

Sorry, I didnt see the Freethinkers forum name. It disappears after I start looking at the thread. Until after I posted it.

Is it just me, or is theists posting in FA becoming more common lately?

I think this is one of the really, really interesting areas of epistemology.  I think I agree with George H. Smith here, in that a person has more choice over whether he or she will consider a particular argument or attempt at persuasion than whether, having considered the argument or persuasion, he or she will believe it.  People don't universally respond to the same types of arguments or persuasions (or else this atheism/theism business would have been concluded long ago), but many people will respond to certain categories of arguments or persuasions over their lives.

If the choice to consider certain arguments or persuasions is not given to someone, perhaps because they are very small children being lectured by parents or other authorities, I do believe the person will have very little choice but to believe in whatever is being put forward by his or her parents.  If, however, that person later decides to consider some new argument or persuasion, it may be possible for the new data to sway him or her to a new world-view.

Whether we teach children that there is a God, which Christians believe they should, OR

we teach children by what we say and do in front of them, we teach them values of one sort of other.

The first is active, the other is passive.

Please convince me that teaching a child to speak profanities, is good for them and the world in which they live.

Or behave just how they want without consequences etc. I'm prepared to be convinced.

Smith went over the justified true knowledge bit in The Case Against God, and Why Atheism? as well.  Mr. Gettier seems to separating the justified and the true aspects of knowledge.  A justified belief is not knowledge unless it's true, and a true belief is also not knowledge unless it is justified.  Given the fallible nature of human knowledge, any rational person must couch a knowledge claim in degrees of certainty as well, which Mr. Gettier doesn't even touch on at that site.

For instance, if James believes that the universe contains an even number of stars, and Sally believes the number of stars is odd, one of them is right.  One of them holds a true belief.  However, it still does not count as knowledge, because neither of them can justify their belief.  Suppose furthermore that they both became astronomers and spent their entire adult lives counting stars (I'll ignore, for the moment, how many lifetimes it would take to count all the stars in the universe).  One of them would surely discover that his or her belief about the number of stars was true, at which point the belief would become justified.  However, the belief is still not infallibly certain.  Neither could know with certainty that he or she could have counted all the stars, as some may be too dim, or occluded by a planet right when James was counting that particular slice of the sky, etc.  That's to say nothing of the stars that would form or fizzle during the counting.

Wow, that was a longer threadjack than I intended. /threadjack

Matt

I agree with you. Belief is not a choice.

I was brought up in a Christian home and now I call myself a Christian.

Not all children raised in a Christian family would call themselves Christian.

I didn't choose my parents nor the things they taught me.

Neither did I choose to be a Christian.

But the bias was heavily in favour of me becoming a Christian.

The Christian religion is full of the idea that we can choose God for ourselves.

However, it's quite the other way around. God chooses who He will to believe on Him.

John 15:16
(Jesus said) You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, . . . .

Conversely, He chooses some to be His adversary.

Romans 9:17
For the scripture says to Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.

Why does God choose some and not others?

I'm not God, so I don't know the answer to that question (or any question like it.)

Belief in the true God is a supernatural choice.

Don't ask me to prove it. I only believe it.

Why would anyone want to do these things?

Well, that's true.  But you miss the point.  What's the difference between believing something that is just wrong, something that could be wrong but has a shifting ground of justification, and something that was true but isn't now.  (also, the logical proof of that particular statement is incredibly complex.  It took Russell to come up with a new logic to do so.)

That makes justification an independent quality of knowledge.

A bit of history:  Plato is the guy that said 'Knowledge is justified true belief.'  That was considered a massive truth achieved by philosophy until Gettier.  In one weekend in a rushed paper to show that he had some publications and was therefore worthy of tenure this man *destroyed* epistemology.  The vast majority of american philosophy has been wrestling with this question ever since.  (In my opinion forgetting why philosophy needs to be done)  I wouldn't discount him quite so haphazardly. 

Also, you are citing examples as what knowledge may be.  I'll accept the example, and say that it seems that your definition of knowledge includes a component of mental content reflecting the actual world in which we live (I'll call this 'true').   The possession of such mental content could be 'belief'.  Justification you covered (well, I might add).

If that's not the common working definition of knowledge, I don't know what it is.  I'm willing to entertain alternate definitions.  (I'll even poke around and see if I can find any to offer -- though honestly I don't think I could construct a definition of the word that I would be happy with).

That's bullshit and anyway the entire "Freethinking Anonymous" forum is for atheists only.

Ok, I'm going to do you a favor; I'm going to give you advice.  You're about to get reamed, if you keep posting here.  They're going to tear statements like that apart.  It's what we do. This is a friendly warning, 'cause I think Matt is about to blow you out of the water. 

Many of the forums like FA has a thread that doesn't move from the top spot - it's stuck there so it's called a "sticky".

I agree we all believe in a set of principles - mine doesn't include God , your's does. Not all belief requires faith.

The only thing required in a religion is faith in a deity. Atheism has none so it's not a religion.

One could just as easily say there are no true theists either. 

If X, then Y, therefore Q.

Q does not follow Y.

Atheism is not a fundamental set of practices agreed upon by any number of people.  Each and every one of us disagrees with each other (and I'm sure someone will disagree with me on that) on a wide range of issues, including some pretty fundamental ones.  Atheism is a rejection of belief in a god or gods.  That's it.  Atheism does not establish any kind of moral code, set of beliefs, or social group.  Your attempt to define us into a religion is not unlike attempting to define Muslims into Christians by saying both groups worship a god.

1. cite the dictionary

2. Again you are conflating the kinds of faith (but I think you know that). If my car starts 9 times in a row I have confidence (faith if you must) based on prior observations that the car will start a 10th time. You don't and can't have that kind of faith for God. Paul doesn't define faith the way you do. Don't you take the Bible seriously?

3. Religions don't do anything. The people in them not only just share common beliefs. They also proselytize and indoctrinate - something atheism doesn't do (because it's not a faith or a religion). It is a lack of a belief in a God - not a belief in no God.

and yes, any mods that can split this off to a new thread - please do.

Ok... once more for anyone who didn't get the memo:

Belief is an automatic state that arises from the acceptance of evidence.  We can demonstrate this to ourselves easily by trying to "believe" something that is clearly false.  For instance, try to believe that you have no hands.  Obviously, I don't mean try to imagine that you have no hands.  I mean believe that you have no hands.

You are completely and utterly bound by the evidence, and you cannot choose to believe it.  Where people get confused is when evidence and strength of belief are not as strong.  Suppose I tell you that I have a cat who plays fetch with sticks, just like a dog.  Based on just that bit of evidence (my testimony) you may or may not believe me, but the fact is that you either do or don't believe my story.  You may choose to act as if you believe it even though you don't, but that would be based on your belief that you ought to do so.  See how it works?

If more evidence was presented -- maybe a video of me and my cat playing fetch -- your belief might change.  Suppose I invited you to my house and you got to watch me play fetch with a cat, and I showed you papers from the vet with my name, his name, and his picture.  Could you then choose to believe that I don't own a fetching cat?  Of course not.

Where people get hung up is that when a belief is tenuously held, it often changes frequently.  Also, the choice to act as if one believes something is often conflated with the actual belief.  Imagine that you are talking to a moderate theist, and you believe that he just goes to church out of habit or social pressure, not real belief.  How are you going to try to talk him out of going to church?  By reasoning with him, right?  You're going to try to talk him out of his belief that acting like he believes in god is good.  You're going to use evidence.  Perhaps you'll change his mind, and perhaps not, but the only thing you can do is present evidence.  (Then again, we have to realize that you might simply coerce him into acting like he believes you, because he believes that's better than acting like he believes in god... then you have someone who believes that acting in the way you want is better than acting the way the church wants, but still believes that in a perfect world, acting like the church wants would be better!)

(Oh, and after talking with this hypothetical theist, you might change your belief.  Maybe he really does believe...)

Someone posted that they chose to change religions.  That's because you believed that changing religions was the best thing to do.  You believed that because of some evidence you possessed.  Without someone offering you evidence to the contrary, you couldn't have chosen not to believe that changing religions was a good thing for you to do at that time.

I know nobody likes to think about this, but the reality is that the concept of free will is incoherent, or at the least, poorly defined.  Choice is also very poorly defined.  Our belief that we are free willed self-deterministic beings is technically false.  We obviously make choices, and we clearly do have control over our own actions, but that control is more superficial than most of us would like to admit.  People who don't grasp the full breadth of the disconnect between our choices and free will often think that if they admit that free will is an illusion, they will be giving people permission to descend into anarchy, but that misses an obvious point!  If people don't actually have free will, they will not descend into anarchy.  They will continue to act as if they have free will because that is the way our perceptual reality functions.

I'm happy to take this to a new thread if there is a better place for discussion. (don't know how it's done)

Forgive me. I'm always falling into the trap of semantics.

But you're absolutely right.

What Paul talks about is quite a different faith. He describes faith as;

"the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

I can't prove God to you. Nothing I say can convince you, nor should I be so arrogant to think I can.

However, there must be truth out there.

Either the world is flat or it's round. Both can't be true.

So absolute truth must exist. We can't all be right (and I'm not saying I have it all right either).

Otherwise, the universe would be chaotic, which it clearly is not.

I don't want to believe you, but I do.

Your last paragraph is so true.

We're only free to act according to our human nature (in its broadest compass).

However, what if my rational thinking was faulty?

What if my emotional responses are broken?

What if my view of myself is completely whacko?

Why! I might even believe (even though I don't know everything) that my powers of reasoning are the final word on my view of the world.

Wow, I didn't choose to be born, didn't choose my sex, the country I was born in, my education, the colour of my skin and yet I can declare with all confidence that I won't believe in stuff I can't see or find reasonable.

"Give me the evidence".

I only have 5 senses and 70 years to live. How much evidence do you need?

Evidence is not enough. I need faith as well. And that kind of faith I have to find outside of myself.

I don't think belief requires perception.  I believe moral things, which aren't perception at all.

Well, saying that morality is collapsable to brain-state is arguably correct.  Your argument against freedom is as well.  

This begs the question of consciousness, then.  An accident of the brain?  Perhaps.  Useful at all?  No.

If it is true that all mental content is collapsible to brain state, and it is true that addressing such things subjectively is irrelevant because of this, then it begs the question: Why address any of it?

If I decide that eating meat is immoral, then it is (nearly) certainly reflected in some structures in my brain.  Stating that to others will not convince anyone.  Stating my reasons for such a belief very well may, however.  I don't believe (heh) that this discussion is how we as a race objectively possess morailty or belief, but how a person subjectively does so.

If the answer to this question ends with : Brain State, then how is any other question different?

Why does that person believe in God?

Brain State.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?

Brain State.

Why do we as people think it's wrong to murder?

Brain State.

Although this is objectively (most likely) true, it isn't helpful.  Don't take this as a criticism, the last thing I am trying to do is inflame the topic.  I think it's important not to dsimiss the topic because it's like trying to nail jello to a tree.

You're confusing some ideas.  Our perception of our existence is our consciousness.  Anything that we believe is a mental representation of our perceptions.

Moral ideas are characterizations of interactions between beings, which must be perceived before being mentally represented.

It certainly does prompt a lot of questions, but confusing philosophy with reality is a mistake.  The word "accident" cannot apply to consciousness because accidents require intent, which is meaningless in natural selection.

Philosophical systems can help us find ways to feel good about existence, but they don't really represent an objective reality -- just a perspective from which to view it.

Oops... this is one of the mistakes I mentioned earlier.   Remember that I said that we clearly do make "choices" and have "self determination."  It seems paradoxical to say this, but choice and free will do exist and they don't exist.  The fact is, we are nothing but algorithms playing out through matter, and at a fundamental level, we don't ever really "choose" anything in the sense that we are always swayed to a decision by our collected empirical data catalog and our hardwired brain circuitry.  On the other hand, our hard-wired brain circuitry tells us that we are the masters of our own destiny, and we are powerless to perceive the world in any other way.  In other words, because our brains are "programmed" to make it patently self obvious that we control our actions, then for all practical purposes, we do.

When I mentioned the fact that people don't just descend into anarchy when they're told that free will is an illusion, I was trying to stave off the descent into nihilism.  Ants don't have any choice but to be ants and do what ants do.  Same for gophers, orangutans and koalas.  Same for humans.  We perceive what we perceive and our brains process that data -- quite beyond our control.  Like rats in a maze, when we come to a fork in the path, we go down one or the other, or we turn around, or we stop moving.  Because life is linear, we are faced with possible options.  When these options present themselves, we opt for one of them.  We cannot help but perceive them the way we do, and that is in the context of self determination.

Of course you don't!  That's because you can't.  You cannot make the choice to believe me because the unavoidable circuitry in your brain has processed all the available information, and rejected a model that seems contradictory to your perceptions.

Brain state IS the answer to all questions of human behavior.  Where you're getting hung up, I think, is that it's not the ONLY answer to the question.  You're creating a kind of weird false dichotomy.  That's what I've been trying to explain to you.  The objective reality that free will is incoherent and that choices are not what we perceive them to be doesn't change our perception.  More importantly, it doesn't change the fact that we have no choice but to continue to make "choices" in our day to day existence.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?  Brain state.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?  Because that's what the traffic laws dictate.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?  Because they're weird.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?  Because it's the way it's always been.

Why do the English drive on the wrong side of the road?  Because they had to choose one side or the other, and it really doesn't matter.

All of these answers, in context, are correct.  I could probably think of at least fifty more, and they, too, would be correct.  An answer only fits a question when it matches the context.  If I am in a psychologist's office for treatment of depression, and I ask what love is, and she replies, "It's when you don't have any score in tennis," she's correct, but she's not answering the question correctly.  Likewise, when a police officer asks a criminal, "Why did you break into the house," he isn't interested in knowing about brain states.  He's interested in the desire behind the action.  Was he after money?  Did he want to rape the woman who lives there?

"Brain State" is too simple an answer for most questions of human cause-effect.  While it's true that a criminal who steals a stereo is just as bound by his own brain state as a theist who believes in god, this reality does not absolve either the criminal or the theist of the real world consequences of their actions, any more than a worker ant who tries to supplant the queen is immune from being killed by workers loyal to the queen.

It isn't helpful for the questions you're trying to answer, but it is helpful.  For instance, it has extremely far reaching implications on childrearing.  It is a piece of data that can be incorporated into other brains that will change the physical actions of the people controlled by those brains.  If, for instance, it was widely known that morals are instinctive and programmed by the environment, largely before puberty, many parents who think it's a good idea to let their children figure out their own morality might change their minds (through no real "choice" of their own!) and take a more active role in programming the young minds.  They would do this, of course, because they cannot help it...

You see what I'm getting at?  Context is critical.  For the question of why theists believe, it is really, really, really important to understand that they don't have a choice but to believe what they believe.  Otherwise, we'll waste an awful lot of time saying things like, "Dude, just choose to be an atheist."  Of course that doesn't work!  It's not enough empirical data for their brain to alter their beliefs.  This also has significance in shaping our own attitudes towards theists.  I, for one, feel pity for theists because I know they are stuck.  That pity motivates me to write about science, in the hope that better information will change more perceptions.  I can't help believing that what I'm doing is right, and I know that.  It doesn't change the fact that I do it... and that's the big point I'm trying to make with you.  Knowledge that you are really more of an automaton than you would like to think doesn't change the fact that you still have to pick which sandwich you want to order when you look at the menu.

Well then I'm completely confused as to why you objected to what I was saying in the first place.  The fact that beliefs cannot be consciously changed is completely relevant to the OP.  It is in the title of the thread, for crying out loud.

It does, but it's a very important point nonetheless.  The reason these questions and problems recur is that they're part of the price of being human.  We won't resolve these problems until we, as a species, change.

Hey Matt...should we ever find ourselves in the same place at the same time, I'd love to buy you a beer. I say this all the time....Beleif is NOT a fucking choice...its the lie theists maintain to help justify the cruelty of of a god who allegedly loves us, but who would banish us to an eternity of torture should we guess the wrong version of his holy written rules & regulations...Hey, we had a choice, right? Deep down these bigoted jizzbuckets know its proposterous, they just need to rationaize.

When you make that kind of choice, the correct word is DENIAL...Beleif is what the acumen of our lifes experience tells us is the truth.

The next time some blundering oaf hits you with this lie, suggest to them that today they should chose to beleive in the tooth fairy. Tell them that they need to abandon their better judgment in favor of a deep seeded conviction that should they put a bi cuspid under their pillow before they slumber, that some twisted bitch in a tu tu will float on in and replace it with loose change.

Every time I hear some ignominious douche blather on about this it makes me want to throw a lighted match in their hair.