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Originally Posted by BeaucoupFish
Would you rather believe what is real, or what makes you happy?
Life is obviously a combination of the two. Which beliefs should be which is an interesting topic of discussion. What about you? Do you think we should always strive for what is "real" rather than what gives the greatest utility? And more importantly, how do you know what is real? Beliefs aren't just intellectual things. We model the world in complex ways - emotionally, intellectually, habitually, philosophically. We also have (very) finite cognitive ability, finite emotional capacity, etc. When you believe something intellectually, it flows over into the other aspects. Intellectual beliefs are a pill with substantial systemic side effects.
Is a man experiencing existential angst because of his cosmic insignificance, created by atheism and a lack of philosophical sophistication, really modelling and understanding the world and reality better than a functional, mentally healthy religious person? I don't think they are.
All representations of reality in human minds are hugely simplified, weirdly optimized models, of questionable or even unknown veracity. Taken at the totality of the mind/emotion/"spirit" level, I'm not sure that atheists are more in touch with reality. Young male atheists certainly aren't. Nietzsche, for example, was as thick as two bricks emotionally and in term of self awareness and awareness of the processes of his mind. Do you think going throw hell and back again to come up with his clownishly stupid "ubermensch" - a ham-fisted attempt to match emotional observations and desires with his intellectual observations - was a good modelling of reality? A 12 year old religious child can understand the concepts better and how they apply to reality.
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It's a harder question to address than it appears on the surface, because you don't really have a conscious choice as to what you believe. Perhaps you can "fake it 'til you make it", and you may eventually legitimately believe something you'd previously not considered to be the case.
I think intellectual sophistication and self awareness does give you a choice on what to believe. Think of the kind of mental tricks talked about in 1984. It's perfectly possible to do them on yourself.
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I can only think about my own reasoning process, and I cannot fathom believing something I thought was probably not true, just so it would make me feel happier.
A certain "letting go" is required to be able to do this.
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Beliefs certainly affect your behaviour, but beliefs don't affect reality, that's the woo realm of The Secret (hopefully not what you were saying).
The Secret is laughable.
But beliefs affect more than behavior. If I believe people find me interesting or intelligent, as opposed to how people actually see me, I model the world differently. This affects more than behavior. It affects mood, philosophical outlook, the kinds of things I can think about, the kind of world I see, the kind of intellectual energy I have. We're little universe models walking around. The world is
actually different for a person who believes something different. Not on all points, but on some.
We don't know the ultimate nature of reality. Perhaps it's a boring dry pointless affair that has no purpose or meaning whatsoever. Perhaps some future mega intelligent AI who grasps that will simply want to terminate itself.
People who invent various structures that don't exist in the outside world may or may not be saner or more rational than those who don't. Ultimately the world is a big fat nothing, open to broad interpretation, and the mind uses a number of tricks to make itself functional and motivated. Are those tricks bad, because they're fake structures? I'm not sure they are.
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Consider that you gave a positive example of how a false belief could effect someone's behaviour. Don't forget about all the negative examples. Would you have to aggregate all the positives and all the negatives before deciding whether something would be a net positive outcome to believe?
I think that's what wisdom is - that very kind of aggregation. Far from an exact science though.
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What if you have a more accurate view of reality, wouldn't you eliminate all the effects, whether positive or negative? What's more, can't someone without a false belief like someone is watching over them, still behave courageously? I think it was Hitchens that said (more eloquently than I'm repeating) that there were no good deeds that necessitated being based on religion.
Yes, all things are possible without a belief in God. Are they more or less likely, though? More or less easy?