I spent a period of about a year in college trying to come to some sort of determination about what I believe on the basis of simply being raised in a Christian household compared what I believed on the basis of reasonable conclusions. I spent a lot of time reading about other religious frameworks and other philosophical perspectives, and spent a lot of time thinking carefully to attempt to gain clarity into my own worldview. Much of that time was about deconstructing my beliefs and searching through the various assumptions that were implicit in my understanding of the world in order to make them explicit. But it wasn't "completed" at that time. That was just getting the foundation set.

The reason that I can speak articulately about my beliefs is because I've spent time (and continue to spend time) refining my own understanding of things. At various points, different things start to appear more or less tenable, and then I continue to adjust and adapt my beliefs based on that new information. This is an active thing that continues to happen all the time.

Using the same measure, I can also see how little time you've spent coming to your conclusions. You've probably spent far less time intellectually engaged in your disbelief and much more of it simply parroting things. Perhaps you're just naturally contrarian. Perhaps it really is just some emotional bias that you're dealing with. Perhaps you've just found a subculture that you've decided to embrace. I don't really know.

But it's absolutely clear that reason has played a significantly smaller role in the development of your beliefs than mine.

You're correct in the sense that at this point in time, I've spent more time actively affirming my beliefs as opposed to actively re-establishing them. But that naturally happens as you get older. After you've rebuilt the machine a couple times, you have less to learn from taking it apart and trying to rebuild it again.

It doesn't seem right to me that the outcome of a process of refinement of belief should be the inability to speak articulately about those same beliefs...

Or at least I like to pretend that all the time I spend thinking about stuff makes me more articulate :P

...I think I can possibly relate to the feeling of being inarticulate about my changing beliefs and engagement with religion, but I would tend to explain that feeling, at least for myself, as having to do with the process of "deconversion", for lack of a better word.

For me, there's an emotional attachment to the symbolic or aesthetic meaning of various religious rituals and ideas, it makes it feel difficult to make some blunt intellectual statement rejecting those same ideas. There's something about what "being Christian" has always meant to me that's still very significant, but more in the sense of an ethic or attitude than in the recitation of a creed. Nevertheless, that attachment makes it feel bad to categorically reject the truth of something like the resurrection, with all of the resonance of the idea of the divine becoming human in order to make humanity divine.

So, I could relate to feeling inarticulate in that way, but I'm guessing that's not really the direction you're trying to go.

This is a nice response, and I appreciate your relating your personal experiences and how they have come to shape your beliefs. While I would still differ with you on our respective definitions of "reason", and how much time we have respectively devoted to using it to shape our beliefs, I appreciate what seems like a genuine effort on your part to discuss these differences in a non-snarky and civil manner.

I will definitely agree with you that I have spent less time reading about philosophy and studying philosophical concepts than you, or other posters in this thread such as OrP, well named, or tamed deuces (and probably others I have neglected to name). I would like to remind you though, that my fervent objections to theism, and particularly how it manifests itself in Abrahamic religions, are rooted in pragmatism and politics, and not in philosophy.

I actually find the philosophical discussion quite fascinating, and I feel I could learn a lot from it - for example, I read the whole thread that well named linked on weak atheism, and I found it very interesting - well, at least the parts I understood. But the philosophical aspect of religion was never the target of my OP, and I have subsequently made that clear. Inevitably, the discussion tends to gravitate in that direction though, and that is perfectly understandable.

Are you responding to a post I made, or Aaron?

That's to Aaron...

I don't think he said anything about not being able to speak articulately about his beliefs though. Did I miss something, or did you read "can" as "can't" in a previous post?

LOL

I totally did.

Yeah, I read what he meant and not what he said too...

Yeah that was a pretty freudian mis-read on my part. Très embarrassant.

Speaking of philosophy - here's a fun experiment. Go on to a random page on Wikipedia, and click the first non-italicised link. Repeat. Within about 10 clicks you will invariably end up on the "Philosophy" page.

It's a fun subject to discuss, but very abstract. Ultimately, everything boils down to philosophy!

Edit: just tried this myself twice. First time was 9 clicks, second time got stuck in a loop! More often than not, I think it's 10-15 clicks though.

I read ahead and so I see that you've re-read what I've stated.

But it's also true that there are some thing which seem almost necessarily inarticulate. "How does one articulate the experience of consciousness?" Really high-level things like that are very difficult to put into words.

However, I also do not deny for a moment that there isn't a level of emotion tied to belief in the same manner that emotion can also be tied unbelief. That's again part of the larger structure that's in place in the human brain when it comes to beliefs. Some bias is warranted (say, bias built on a more objective approach) and some bias is unwarranted (say, bias built solely on an emotional reaction). We do our best to sort it out, and that's all we really can do.

This is the part that's much harder to push through because the human brain isn't just a rational device. I remember something from what I think was an NPR Science Friday talk about a person who had a brain injury that kind of shut down his emotions. He had difficulty with simple decisions like picking which color pen to write with because there was an insufficient rational basis upon which to make the decision (or something like that).

This whole thing is really a complicated business.

Millions of people have spent a lot more time than you thinking about winning dice betting systems. Every single one of them are less likely than you to be correct about that subject.

I'm perfectly capable of understanding your sentence, thanks. Over-complicating language is a sign of insecurity rather than intelligence.

Articulately, but it would be nice if you were willing to do it clearly. I have no doubt that you've spent a lot of time exploring your beliefs, but I'd also bet it hasn't been done from an unbiased start point.

There are no unbiased start points.

True. I do not equate time spent with correctness.

However, I do equate failure to present reasonable arguments with a failure to think logically.

And you would win that bet. There's no such thing as "an unbiased start point."

I'd also bet it hasn't been done from the least biased start point possible.

If so, I would hope that you could provide a meaningful reply.

The language is actually quite plain. That you think is complicated is a sign of something else entirely.

You'd win the bet again. There doesn't exist a position that can be defined as "the least biased start point possible." It's not like this stuff is linearly ordered.

Aaron, you did actually touch on the reasons for your beliefs and the work you'd done to explore them, I would actually be interested in the detail.

The reason it currently appears illogical to me is that you constantly attack the alternative view, rather than present the process you went through to get to your view. You state that you don't claim the evidence to be rock solid, yet will attack anything scientific that isn't rock solid. The illogical part to me is this biased treatment of evidence.

Let's just agree to disagree on your communication style.

I do think that one of the reasons I misread your post is that I don't usually associate your posting with articulations of religious belief. Of course I haven't actually read all your posts, this is just my impression, which may be more or less unfair, I don't know.

But when I think of your style as a poster in RGT I usually think of you poking holes in other people's ideas/arguments, and not presenting too many of your own. There's nothing wrong with that, and as you say there are very few theists in RGT and it's always been somewhat of a hostile environment for theists, so I can also understand why one might adopt a more defensive posting strategy. I used to have some vague aspirations towards writing more about what a "reformed" Christianity would look like imo, but it was never a project for posting about in RGT because there's not really an audience for it here. In the meantime I seem to have abandoned that idea anyway :P

I've described the general process of what I went through to come to my view. It would be extremely long (and probably quite boring) for me to try to recount a year's worth of observations, intellectual ponderings, and also the evaluated experiences of the last 20 years or so.

Are you quite certain you're reading my writings? In what ways have I "attacked anything scientific that isn't rock solid"? In this conversation, I've been far more on the side of science (presenting and defending positions from scientific literature) than the primary person I've been conversing with (who has basically challenged scientific literature that runs in opposition to his beliefs).

I grew out of Martingale by the age of 17 (I guess that's a little embarrassing to admit), even though my dad had tried to explain to me why it didn't work from a much younger age - he was wrong in his reasoning, which was table limits, but I guess some people never grow out of the mindset "it makes sense to me, so **** you and your so-called facts".

Edit: As an aside (before I get nit-picked) - obviously Martingale doesn't work because of table limits, but it obviously doesn't work because of many other things too; the claim was that casinos have table limits to protect against Martingale, which is false.