Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics. But you don’t do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, crusades and jihads, holy wars and purges and pogroms, the Inquisition and burning of witches.
Q: So why do we insist on believing in God?
A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
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naelyn /
belief, concept, fantasy, idea, ideas, legend, perfection, real, unreal
#1481
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Book: “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, pgs 160
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Then he’s tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he’d innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He’d found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn’t really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
Book: “Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, p 162
Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.
Movie: Miracle on 34th Street
The best-kept secret today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than enjoy a pampered idleness.
Nothing changes more consistently than the past; the past that influences our lives is not what actually happened but what we believe happened.
I did have a test today. It’s on European socialism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not European, I don’t plan on being European, so who [cares] if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. That still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any ism for that matter. Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism — he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me”. A good point there.
Movie: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.
The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Take the blue pill and you wake up back in your apartment believing… whatever you want to believe. Or: take the red pill, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole really goes…
Movie: The Matrix