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Belief and Imagination

Fool

ALL in all
Premium Member
are belief and imagination necessarily a negative thing??

or can they in fact be helpful and healthy?
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Imagination is what makes we humans, human. It's what distinguishes us from the other life forms. It's why and how we can use tools. It's why we are able to ask questions. It's how we ascribe value and meaning to aspects of the world around us, and to ourselves. We humans are basically just oversized chimps with very big imaginations, imagining that we're something other than what we are ... and then proving it.
 

viole

Ontological Naturalist
Premium Member
are belief and imagination necessarily a negative thing??

or can they in fact be helpful and healthy?

Well, the property of human brains to believe in gods must provide some survival advantages. Otherwise, it would not have been naturally selected. Probably.

Ciao

- viole
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
are belief and imagination necessarily a negative thing??

or can they in fact be helpful and healthy?

When the imagination is being believes as if it were real and not imagination, then that's always a bad thing.
No matter what seemingly "positive" short term effects it might have.

The truth, is its own reward.
Willfull ignorance, its own punishment.

As Neil deGrass Tyson say: "I'ld rather know"
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
Faith is the most important thing there is after love and pacifism.
"faith" has the gruesome ability of making people fly airplanes into buildings, while thinking they are actually doing a good thing.

That's what bothers me IMMENSLY about faith. There literaly is NOTHING that you can not believe on "faith".
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
Well, the property of human brains to believe in gods must provide some survival advantages. Otherwise, it would not have been naturally selected. Probably.

Religion is a psychological byproduct of certain mental capacities.
It were those mental capacities that provided the advantage. Not the side effects.

So you could also say that religion just piggy backed on top of other traits that were actually beneficial.

I heared an interesting hypothesis once that said that religious beliefs (faith based beliefs) are actually a result of human brains being very very prone to type 1 cognition errors: the false positive, coupled with infusion of agency in seemingly random events.

Like hearing a noise in the bushes. Is it just the wind? Or is it a dangerous predator sneaking up on you?
Those who stand around gathering more informaton before making a decision on that question, are lunch in case it is a dangerous predator.

Those who simply assume it's a predator out to get them (= agency and false positive) will run instantly. These people survive either way - wether it was a predator or just the wind.

This is what superstition is, at bottom.
It forms one of the feeding grounds of religious belief.

Makes perfect sense to me.

So, no, it's not "belief in god" that gives a survival advantage. It's false positives and unwarranted infusion of agency that does that.
 

Muffled

Jesus in me
I believe belief is an absolute necessity. Disbelief means a person is not living in reality.

I believe fantasy for most people comes in the form of dreams and it is believed a person needs to dream to stay healthy.
 

Muffled

Jesus in me
Well, the property of human brains to believe in gods must provide some survival advantages. Otherwise, it would not have been naturally selected. Probably.

Ciao

- viole

I believe that is conjecture which comes pretty close to fantasy. The truth is that our fantasies often reflect a form of reality. For instance I can fantasize a giraffe;s neck and head attached to an elephants body but my fantasy reflects the reality of giraffes and elephants.
 

Workman

UNIQUE
So in other words your saying to believe in facts?
Something that is not alive..and your saying to worship that?
Your owned by facts is your truth..which means you are a thing not a person..A THING
 
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Workman

UNIQUE
Your owned by facts is the truth..which means you are a thing not a person..A THING
You don’t even know how you came about to being alive!..and all a sudden you know everything there is, and what to...From facts?
 
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