Take a person who says that she is believes that everyone is faced with a choice to follow God or not, and that those who follow God are rewarded with an eternal life of bliss while those who don't are condemned to hell or to annihilation. However, this person doesn't really live any differently than most of her non-Christian neighbors. She attends church only infrequently, doesn't really engage in other religious rituals, and actively engages in behavior she thinks goes against the teachings of her church. This is a very common story. Normally we think that people's actions are at least roughly consistent their beliefs. But in this case they don't seem to be. How do we explain this?

1) One option is that she is lying. She doesn't really believe these things. This is probably true sometimes--there is in some places pressure to be a member of a religion whose tenets you actually reject. This is probably true some of the time. However, because there are so many people like this it seems unlikely that they are all lying. Or, this is not a very good explanation because this posits something (large amounts of lying) just as much in need of explanation as what we are explaining.

2) Another option is that she thinks she believes these religious things, but she really doesn't. Usually this goes along with a functionalist account of belief, where believing something means that you act as if you believe it. However, this isn't a complete explanation yet. You would still need to explain then why people say they believe these things. Here you might say that saying these things are just ways of signalling group identity (or other related ideas) without having any strong cognitive content. I think this is a plausible explanation, but I think undervalues the cognitive content of religious claims.

3) A third option comes from the modular theory of the mind. This theory says that our minds do not have general principles of rationality that structure our behavior, but rather has domain-specific adaptations that lead to rational actions in those specific domains. On this account, the less that our beliefs have to do with the empirical world the less likely they are to affect our actions. Thus, religious beliefs about say, hell or heaven with little empirical results relevant to adaptive behavior will not have much impact on our behavior.

Of course, on this account you would still have to explain why people have these religious beliefs. But it wouldn't be a mystery why people with these religious beliefs often don't act rationally on the basis of these beliefs.

Atheism, regarded simply as the absence of belief in a god, doesn't have any implications for our behavior, so I don't think this is a useful comparison. However, I suspect that you would find a similar amount of inconsistency among atheists about their own non-empirical beliefs, e.g. about morality and politics.

Alright fair enough.

I do think this calls into questions about judgement and stuff. But fair enough.

A pumping heart would be a better example.

I think you hit on it by mistake. Its the sin nature. We are flesh, and when saved and sealed by the Holy Spirit we are still living in the flesh, in a physical world where Satan rules and subject to constant spiritual warfare.

There is a lot of scripture on this and I could go on and on. If Satan tempted the Jesus would he not also tempt us all? Only Jesus sinned not. The saved sin a lot.

hit on it by mistake? i seem to remember writing that on purpose

Ok. Going from what you know about christians and christian theology, would you assume a christian account of existence in heaven include pumping hearts and blood vessels?

Obv. there ar further options, such as 4) That person has a conception of "following God" that's not identical with what her church prescribes. Or 5) Concerning church rituals etc., she doesn't assume that the teachings of her church necessarily agree with what God "wants". Or 6) She's taking the message of forgiveness rather naively at face value and concludes that for as long as she sincerely regrets (or believes to sincerely regret) her actions, God will forgive. I'm sure there are more opitions still.

Perhaps I'm a bit late to comment on this, apologies.

From what I gather, the basic idea is that there are three things that lead us to sin: the devil, the world, and the flesh. Once we are dead and in heaven, those three things are no longer present, and therefore there is no temptation nor desire to sin.

Also, we are supposed to get a new body in heaven. What that means in terms of mind/thoughts, I'm not sure. There's an interesting bit by Francis Chan I saw recently, where he was discussing marriage, and he made an aside about how he wasn't so sure that we would know our spouses in heaven. He wasn't 100% on this or anything, but just quoted a couple passages that referred to the mystery of the conservation (or lack thereof) of identity in heaven. There's a good chance that, once in heaven, we will have an overwhelming desire to simply worship God 24/7.

No.

We will not need our hard wired hearts since we will not have hearts. Hearts in heaven wont go form hard wired to not hard wired. They will go form hard wired to not existing.


This is a little different then sinful thoughts. Since we will still have thought they just wont be sinful hard wired anymore.

I did not make my statements with any disdain intended. I am not trying to make any judgments or comments re Liberal Christians. The only point I wanted to make was that people often just go with the flow based on social influence. When I first wrote that post I used Conservative Christians as the example and then replaced it to use "Liberals" as the example, namely because MB was asking why aren't Christians more committed. I think Liberal Christians are less committed to the hard and fast rules of doctrine. I don't necessarily think this is bad, I am increasingly liberal myself.

Thats not a bad answer that takes out of God changing our wiring.

how will we still have thought, if the heart, and, i assume, the whole body, is no longer existing.

No idea.

Fair enough. To be honest I was mostly just using your throwaway comment as an excuse to make my point rather anyway--I didn't know enough about your own views to know if it applied to you. I do think though that what I describe is a common attitude among evangelical Christians.

Sure, there are other options. Mostly I was trying to get at was explaining the reality of people who are seemingly sincere believers in a religion, but whose behavior isn't significantly affected by that belief.

I agree it's an important point to make irrespective of LZ's personal position. I think the attitude extends beyond evangelical Christians and contributes to those atheists who hold that liberal religionists are somehow cheating and less theologically sound.

My background is pretty conservative and I think your assessment is correct. Many conservative evangelicals definitely look down on liberal types. I don't really care about the politics of it all I just want to know the truth.

Adding fuel to the fire of the "us v. them" mentality is fruitless IMO.

Being an atheist doesn't require me to do anything other than not believe in gods and what I meant by 'committed' was that I have that belief firmly and act accordingly. There is no effort on my part, I simply feel strongly about it. I don't hedge my bets, I don't accidentally do religious things and I don't act differently than how I believe or compromise those beliefs because of peer or social pressure.

If I believed in god, I would follow his guidance to the letter. I wouldn't do anything that carried with it a risk of eternal damnation and I would do everything I could to ensure my arrival in eternal heaven. For that reason then, I doubt the 'commitment' of believers to their beliefs, when they don't do what I've just described. This could technically be an extension of the discussion about why every Christian or Muslim, for example, isn't doing their best to convert everyone who's not part of their belief system.

These would be the possibilities that fit the 'they don't really believe' option.

This makes me curious as to whether MToM was developed and the people said 'ah that would explain the lack of devout behaviour most theists exhibit', or was it developed to help explain that phenomenon?

" On this account, the less that our beliefs have to do with the empirical world the less likely they are to affect our actions."

And yet for many theists, their belief inform every action they take. Why do they exist then and why are they the minority?


That's the bit that's not a mystery to me.

Yes, I've said the same thing when people ask me what impact losing faith would have on theists, when I've been arguing for why their behaviour helps support their belief and makes them less likely to abandon it. That's another discussion though.

These kinds of protest you can find towards any ism, belief, conviction or choice: "If you X, shouldn't you Y"?

If we dissect the argument, we can boil it down to this:
a) Humans can be be rational
b) Humans should be rational
c) You are not rational
d) I am rational

Typical examples:
"If you truly cared about fuel economy, you would be riding a bicycle"
"If you really wanted to lose weight, you would eat less"
"If you had really meant that, you would not have written this"

Generally speaking, I find this form of argument to be extremely dangerous. It disguises itself as a logical argument, but in essence it is merely a dialectic argument. It purports to attack statements, but in reality implicitly states that the statements (or situation) is a result of deceit or delusion.

So again, your analogy basically fails. Since your "irreligious commitment" basically commits you to an absence of a behavior, it's really hard to draw a meaningful comparison with a "religious commitment" which commits people to a large number of affirmative behaviors.

You are welcome to believe what you want to believe. But as with your general characterization of religion, you seem to have little grounding in reality.

Funny how you're pointing out that by comparison with Atheists who have an absence of behaviour, theists have a significant amount of impact on their behaviour because of their religious beliefs and yet when I argue that that very aspect of religious belief that plays a part in making religion harder to give up, you argue the opposite, that it would have little impact on behaviour to lose faith.

You can't have it both ways Aaron.

This would be the reality where people profess a belief in eternal damnation and then go ahead and act as if it's not true anyway? I know all about that reality because it's the one that informs my belief that none of what religions say about gods is true. Even the majority of people who believe don't believe strongly enough to, by the example of their behaviour, convince me that they might be right.

Huh? Where have I argued what now?

Have you ever seen a husband get mad at his wife and say something hurtful, but then later come back and say "I love you"? Clearly, he doesn't *actually* love her because if he did he would never get angry and say mean things. He must be lying to himself and is deluded about his beliefs about his wife.

There's quite a collection of evidence in this forum that you don't really have a good connection to logic and reasoning, that your perspective of history is not very clear, and that your observations about the religious people are often wrong. This gives me sufficient reason to doubt your connection to reality.

I love how selective your memory is sometimes. It's like you're two different people. You're not two different people are you?

Can the wife damn her husband to something comparable to an eternity in Hell? You can love someone and get cross with them, not really the same as believing in an all powerful god then going out to commit a sin against that god, is it. Analogy fail. Wow.

Let's make it simple. Quote the thing you think I'm arguing, and we'll see if it actually lines up with your characterization.

LOL -- What are you talking about? Your basic premise is that people who aren't behaving in a way that's consistent with their beliefs must not actually believe it.

Edit: You may want to reread Original Position's post:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&postcount=26

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I'm pointing out that people act in ways that are contrary to their beliefs in many areas of their life. It takes a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty to try to isolate religion into its own special category of beliefs insulated from all other modes of human thou... oh wait. You've already done this in multiple threads.

I guess that means you're just intellectually dishonest.

Nope, the thing is, this is the religion forum, see? Here we focus on religion. All other modes of human beliefs are discussed in the allothermodesofhumanbeliefs forum.