I have to side with
@Left Coast on this one, namely, that belief is not a choice to certain kind of mind, which suggests to me that people who can choose what to believe have different kinds of minds from those who can't. You don't seem to acknowledge that this other kind of mind exists. But I assure you that it does.
This kind of thinking - critical thinking - may have been a choice to pursue, but once made, there are no further choices, just the valid analysis of evidence and tentative belief commensurate in strength with the quality and quantity of the relevant evidence.
Apparently, you are assuming that only nonbelievers can think critically and look at evidence, and that all believers believe on faith and emotion. I disagree, because some believers believe on evidence.
Do you think that that is a fair comparison? These human beings are making every effort to be heard and believed, because that is what reasonable people do that want to be understood and believed.
That is what people do, but God is not a person.
You mentioned earlier that we are expected to use our intelligence. I don't know about expected, but I will rely on my wits whatever its origin, and my mind tells me that if there is a god in this orderly, mathematical, reasonable, comprehensible universe that it expects me to use the faculties I was gifted with, which means that if there is a god, those are things it admires, and so do I.
That completely concurs with Baha’i beliefs. We are expected to use our intelligence in all matters.
You seem to use the words choose and choice differently than I do. For me, there has to be two or more options all available to the chooser to call it a choice. In fact, when we only have one option, some people call that having one choice, but I would call it having no choice.
I think there is always more than one option available, so there is always a choice.
Free will is an interesting topic. It appears to be essential to Christian doctrine, but there are good reasons to question whether any of our choices are indeterministic, and whether the feeling of being free to choose isn't an illusion itself generated deterministically.
I do not think we are free to do anything we want to do. Humans have the will/ability to make choices based upon their desires and preferences. Our desires and preferences come from a combination of factors such as
childhood upbringing, heredity, education, adult experiences, and present life circumstances. How
free they are varies with the situation. Certainly what we refer to as “free will” has many constraints. However, we have the ability to make choices. Otherwise, we would just be at the mercy of our past experiences and our heredity.
Except that no two got the same message. The reason I trust reason and evidence over faith is that the former is tied into physical reality, which is why there have been thousands of gods reported, but only one periodic table of the elements. If the scientists used faith rather than observation, they'd each have their own table, and none would be expected to be correct.
It makes logical sense why no two got the same message, because different messages were delivered at different times throughout human history. Why would a God keep revealing the same message, when the conditions of the world and humanity keep changing over time? The periodic table of the elements might remain the same but the world changes as do people.
Just as science evolves over time and scientists make new discoveries, in order to be useful religion has to evolve over time to keep up with the times. A religion that is static is not very useful because it cannot accommodate any change. I think the reason more people cannot understand this is because they are so emotionally attached to their older religions and also because they consider religion separate from life on earth. Baha’is see religion as a dynamic process that evolves over time and it is vitally connected to the world we live in, not just to a spiritual world to come.
I can agree with that. I did seek truth about gods and think I found it, although I doubt that you would find my conclusions useful to you. The world makes more sense without god beliefs. I no longer need to ignore evidence that contradicts my former god belief. I no longer need to wonder why little girls are allowed to die of leukemia. I no longer need to find endless excuses to justify the internal contradictions, unkept promises, moral and intellectual failings of a deity, failed prophecies, and errors in science and history. The world makes more sense.
I fully understand how the world would make more sense to you without god beliefs, especially the beliefs you held, but I would still have the same questions without god beliefs because I would wonder why things are the way they are. I could never just be happy because my life was happy, I would always care about the suffering of others. I would want to know why. Although religion does not provide a complete answer, it does provide answers that make sense to me.
I do not need to wonder why little girls are allowed to die of leukemia; it is because they contracted the disease. Because I do not have unrealistic expectations of God, what God should be doing because God is omnipotent, I do not expect God to do what it is the responsibility of humans to do, like finding cures for disease. This is why I do not have the conflicts you apparently had. I believe that both science and religion are necessary; like the two wings of a bird, humanity cannot fly and make progress if either one of them is not strong. Each has its own domain; religion deals with humans and moral and spiritual issues, science deals with making the material world better for us to live in.
You seem to assume that seeking a god mans finding one. I can assure you that that is not always the case. After a sincere and prolonged effort to sort out what's what, I arrived at tentative conclusions that have served me well and which I have no incentive to modify, or as others say, no incentive to continue seeking.
No, I certainly do not assume that seeking guarantees finding. All I was saying was that not seeking pretty much guarantees not finding. It is like if you do not look for a job you will not find a job. Of course there are exceptions; someone could tell you about a job they heard about, but that is not how one usually gets a job. Some people have to seek longer and harder, others not so much. I think some of that is determined by fate.
It's interesting how seeking forever is considered a virtue by many. My guess is that if one is still seeking, he has an unsatisfied need, and if he has been seeking for decades and decades, he's going about it wrong and will never find what he's looking for. like a man searching for his keys for decades. What is desirable is not to seek, but to find.
I agree that if one has been searching for decades and still has not found anything they are going about their seeking incorrectly; either that or there is nothing to find.
Of course I am biased but I think we all have a need to find out the truth about God.
Now, let's look at your comment again, but substitute keys: We all have a choice whether we want to spend our time seeking our keys or doing other things. Eventually, we should choose to stop looking for them. There is no virtue in spending sixty or seventy years unsuccessfully looking for them. Likewise with gods.
No, certainly not that many years. That reminds me of my husband who is always losing things around the house. Recently, he lost his only pair of shoes and I told him it would just be easier to get another pair.
Trailblazer said: We cannot blame God if we did not make any effort to believe.
Then we can blame God if we did make that effort, but still don't believe?
I suspect that you would say no, that we can never blame God for anything, but once again, I would disagree, even though I don't accept the existence of this god, which I must discuss in the hypothetical. With omniscience and omnipotence comes omniresponsiblity, which means that all praise and blame go to such an agent. If a person makes a sincere effort to find a god and fails, either no such god exists, or a god exists that is indifferent to us, incapable of communicating with us, or unaware of us.
Why does someone have to be to blame? If someone makes a sincere effort and still does not find God, I do not blame them or God. I write it off to fate. Sincerity and effort is all God requires of anyone.
Belief is very easy to the faith-based thinker. He simply chooses to believe, and voila, it is done.
I guess I must not be one of those faith-based thinkers then; but I know what you mean since I listen to Christian radio all day long while I am on the computer…. It is as easy as accepting Jesus into your life. Often it sounds attractive to me but I could never go for that kind of emotion-based belief because I am very analytical and I need to have a belief that makes sense to me.
For the reason and evidence-thinker, belief is easy if given the evidence. It is irrational to posit that a loving god that wants to be known, understood, loved in return, obeyed, and worshiped would withhold convincing evidence.
Then I guess I must be one of those thinkers, because I go with what there is evidence for, not for what is emotionally satisfying or easy. I have never been one to take the easy way.
I believe that God you described does provide good evidence, but it does not convince everyone.
"If there is a god, that god should know exactly what it would take to change my mind...and that god should be capable of doing whatever it would take. The fact that this hasn't happened can only mean one of two things: 1. No such god exists. 2. Whatever god exists doesn't care to convince me, at this time. In either case, it's not my problem and there's nothing I can do about it. Meanwhile, all of those believers who think that there is a god who does want me to know that he exists - are clearly, obviously, undeniably... wrong." - Matt Dillahunty"
I agree with Matt --
Whatever god exists doesn't care to convince me, at this time.
But that does not mean that there is nothing he can do about it. He assumes that if God exists God would want to convince Him of that but that is dead wrong. God wants us to use our own innate intelligence. Otherwise, why would we have evolved with a brain that has these capabilities?
God does not want us to know that He exists but God does not want to be the one doing the convincing. God wants us to become convinced by doing our own homework, but only if we want to. It all goes back to free will.